Leclerc baffled by ‘difficult day to understand’ for Ferrari while Sainz predicts ‘headaches’ in Belgium

Charles Leclerc was left searching for answers after a “difficult day to understand” for Ferrari on Friday at the Belgian Grand Prix, despite second practice appearing promising for the squad on the timesheets.

Leclerc ended FP2 in P4 – 0.261s ahead of team mate Carlos Sainz in P5 – but, when asked for his thoughts after the session, the Monegasque admitted that it had been a challenging day to decipher.

FP2: Norris tops the second practice times ahead of Piastri and Verstappen in Belgium

“A very difficult day to understand, to be honest,” said Leclerc. “A lot of difference of pace in different conditions and different tyres as well, so everybody was on a different plan.

“It’s been quite a few years now that it’s difficult to understand the picture on the Friday with those generation of cars, but today is even more so difficult.”

Another factor that could potentially further complicate things is that of the weather, with the possibility of rain arriving on Saturday at Spa-Francorchamps. With that in mind, Leclerc offered an explanation for how he and the Scuderia will approach the meetings heading into the end of Friday.

“We’ve got to focus on ourselves, try to find the right compromise between tomorrow which will be probably wet and Sunday when it will be dry, but we are on it,” the 26-year-old commented.

HIGHLIGHTS: Relive the action from FP2 in Belgium as Norris goes fastest

“We still have quite a lot of meetings to go through and hopefully we find the best compromise for tomorrow and Sunday.”

In terms of where he is lacking at the moment – and whether this is concentrated in a particular sector – Leclerc answered: “No, unfortunately we are just struggling compared to McLaren especially, it’s a little bit everywhere.

“We don’t have any magical solution for tomorrow, but we’ll give our best. It’s the last race before the holidays, so I hope we can finish on a high.”

Sainz also recognised that there is still plenty for Ferrari to figure out after Friday’s running, with the Spaniard admitting that the weekend had brought a “very different start to what we’re used to”.

READ MORE: Sainz reflects on Binotto’s arrival at Audi as he explains whether that will influence decision on his F1 future

He continued: “Since they’ve done the resurface around the whole track, there is a lot more grip and there is a lot more things to learn on this new surface, a lot more graining also on the tyres so it makes the degradation more tricky and less controllable, so I think it’s going to be giving us Formula 1 teams and drivers some headaches going into tonight.”

Pushed on getting the balance between preparing for a wet qualifying and a possibly dry race, Sainz reflected: “It looks like it’s going to be a wet qualifying, but at the same time it also said it was going to rain all day today and it didn’t, so [I’m] open-minded going into tomorrow. The weather here is always unpredictable and we will just need to adapt to whatever comes.”