“It’s probably our best FP2 this season”: Charles Leclerc reflects on a ‘positive’ session ahead of the Australian F1 GP

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc stated that his P2 finish at the end of Friday's FP2 in Melbourne was the 'best session' of the year for him.

Leclerc finished almost half a second behind Fernando Alonso in the FP2 session and looked comfortable throughout the rain-affected session. He finished ahead of his teammate Carlos Sainz and even ahead of reigning world champion Max Verstappen.

Speaking to F1.com, he said:

“I feel like the feeling is a bit better than the other races, so that is positive. It is probably our most positive FP2 of the season, which doesn’t mean much, but at least it is a Friday that finishes on a positive note."

Leclerc added:

"Now we need to work, do another step in the right direction tomorrow and hopefully, we will be a bit closer to the Red Bulls tomorrow [in qualifying], and especially [during the race]."

“In quali I think it will be close once again. In the race, unfortunately with the rain [in FP2], nobody did the high fuel runs, so on that we are going a little bit blind into the race. Maybe in FP3 we’ll see a bit more long runs and hopefully we’ll manage to learn a bit more there.”

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"Maybe we [will] find a little bit of performance" - Charles Leclerc

Charles Leclerc was more optimistic after the first two practice sessions but mentioned that the team has to focus on extracting performances on Sundays.

He said:

“I think that with the different changes we’ve done today, maybe we [will] find a little bit of performance. We must not forget that last race, we were really, really struggling in the race and we won’t be finding this kind of lap time in the race, but this should be a step in the right direction."

Leclerc's teammate Carlos Sainz echoed his sentiments but wasn't too fussed about the results in practice, adding:

“Obviously practice is practice, but we did use that FP1 to try some very different things on the car to see if we could find a bit of performance for the package that we have now. We did seem to understand a bit better and find a couple of things that could help us in the future, but until we don’t put it into practice in a proper quali lap, we will not know.”

Both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz will hope to extract more points in Melbourne than they did in the first two races of the season.