Ferrari drivers pleased to be closer than expected to Red Bull

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz admit they are closer to Max Verstappen than they expected after qualifying in the top three for the Austrian Grand Prix.

Verstappen secured his fourth pole position in a row at the Red Bull Ring but after setting down an impressive benchmark with a 1m04.391s on his final run, he saw Leclerc fall just 0.048s short a few moments later. Although the Monegasque has been on pole position in Azerbaijan earlier this year, he says he hadn’t felt a repeat battle was on the cards prior to Friday’s running.

“I managed to put everything that I wanted in the last lap of Q3,” Leclerc said. “Very close to Max -- not enough today but overall I don’t think we expected to be so close to the Red Bull. So it's a good step forward.

“I would like to thank all the guys back at the factory -- it’s only qualifying but the work they’ve done in the last two or three weeks in order to bring the package earlier than it was planned was really, really impressive and that helped us to have a good performance today. Now we need to confirm that in the (sprint) race tomorrow and Sunday.

“There’s always something more (left out there). Turn 3 was not ideal, Turn 1 there were quite a few snaps -- we tried to add a bit more front wing for the last run in Q3 and it was probably a tiny bit too much, but at the end of the day it’s part of the game. Very, very close to pole position, which is a good sign, but we all know that our weakness is the race, so we are waiting for the race to try and see if we confirm the positive signs that we’ve seen in Montreal.”

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Despite the strong one-lap performance, Leclerc says he’s more interested in learning more about the race pace of the Ferrari after an upgrade package that was introduced in Austria.

“All the effort is made to make our race pace better. So it is great to be on the front row, it is great to be close again to pole position -- or at least to be fighting for it -- but on the other hand we still need to wait because the points are scored on Sunday and since the beginning of the season that’s where the struggles are for us.”

Sainz was within 0.2s in third place during Friday’s qualifying for Sunday’s race, and he is hopeful of joining in a double podium for the team on Sunday but says the possibility of rain forecast for the sprint might impact the chances of repeating the performance on Saturday.

“It was good, I think we had a strong qualifying as a team and definitely felt like we made some progress recently,” Sainz said. “I think we still have a lot of the weekend ahead of us. At least for today we put ourselves in a good position for Sunday to try and get a podium with both cars. I think tomorrow will be a different day with different forecast, different track conditions, so it could also be a very different picture and we just need to stay focused.

“Obviously we are in parc ferme so it’s not like we can improve the car a lot from today to tomorrow, but we will look into the smallest details and the smallest things to see if we can pick up a tenth or two... but I think the conditions tomorrow are going to be very, very different.”