Seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton has revealed the effects of a new floor upgrade to his Ferrari SF-25 F1 car after the second free practice session at Spielberg.
Considering Hamilton’s ongoing struggles as he adjusts to the new car this season, Ferrari introduced a new floor for the Austrian Grand Prix, with changes made to the diffuser, floor edge, fences, and body.
However, Hamilton was unable to test the floor in Free Practice 1 due to a gearbox failure. In the second practice session, he was the tenth fastest. Hamilton opened up on the gearbox problem before admitting that the car wasn’t good enough to battle for the top positions. He told F1:
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“We had a problem in the morning with the gearbox, which was obviously difficult, frustrating for everyone in the garage obviously because the boys did a great job, kept topping it up.
“But you go out, you can only do one lap, and so we didn’t get the long runs. But I think we recovered okay with it, they did a great job changing the gearbox and getting us ready for FP2.
“Charles was six-tenths off, I was close to a second off, so not ideal. But I think there’s lots of learnings, so I think we will make some changes. Hopefully we can try and get a little bit closer. We won’t be at the front.”
When asked whether the new floor made any difference, the 40-year-old driver said:
“A huge amount of work went on to bring the floor, but as you see it’s not necessarily changed our competitiveness.
“The car actually doesn’t feel bad, we’re just a huge chunk off pace-wise, so we need to look into that and that’s about it really. We just keep pushing, just trying to dial the car in more and see what we can get, but it’s obviously very close in the top 10 so a tenth could make a difference, so we’ll work towards trying to gain at least that over the night.”
Hamilton’s teammate Charles Leclerc stressed that the SF-25 needed more performance and called for changes to be made overnight for the qualifying session. He added:
“I felt kind of at ease on the track straightaway, but not really at ease with the car and the way the car feels, so there’s quite a bit of work to be done for tomorrow.
“It doesn’t feel like the performance is quite there yet, but hopefully we will put everything together tomorrow and do a step forward, but there’s quite a lot of work to be done tonight.
“Long run [pace] seems to be more positive as we very often have – we are faster on the race [pace] than we are in Qualifying. In Qualifying, there’s a lot of work to be done.”