Some expected the Ferraris to suffer in qualifying in Las Vegas, due to less aggressive tire heating and the risk of not being able to place the Pirelli tires in the correct operating window.
Finally, the result at the end of the session this Friday evening (Saturday morning in France) is rather good, with the second place of Carlos Sainz 89 thousandths from the pole of George Russell and the fourth time of Charles Leclerc, for his part relegated to four tenths of his teammate.
However, for the Monegasque, warming up the tires was indeed a problem, as he explained on Canal+ after qualifying: “The analysis is that it's a bit the same problem as at the start of the year, when things weren't going well in qualifying. This weekend, I didn't manage to get the tires up to temperature , never. Do anything, it didn't work.”
“After four or five laps we are very fast, but hey, four or five laps, we don't have them in qualifying. I didn't do a good job on that, Carlos managed to get them up to temperature well better than me, that was also the case in FP3, in FP2 too. I'm trying to work but I just couldn't do it.”
“Pierre [Gasly, troisième de la Q3] was exceptional”he added. “George did a really good job too. I think there's really something about the tires: they [Mercedes] had more trouble than us with degradation all year round, we arrived here knowing that getting the tires up to temperature would be very important. Mercedes gets the tires up to temperature really quickly.”
Enough to foresee, with the racing pace displayed by the SF-24 in the dry since Austin, a good race this Sunday: “I have hope for tomorrow because I think we really had a very fast race performance. I don't know if that made me have a little more trouble for today. We'll see tomorrow. “
France
