Barcelona, Alonso’s home country!

An uncharacteristic mistake from Fernando Alonso in Q1 blunted his challenge. A trip through the gravel at the final corner damaged the floor of the car and he could only manage ninth fastest

Let’s start analyzing the head-to-head of the two spanish drivers on their home track.

SAI is very fast compared to ALO, with relevant difference as speed data recorded on all the straights.

As a result SAI is distancing ALO and winning their personal race.

Nevertheless we need to highlight that the Ferrari is not completely stable and balanced on the track.

Maybe they’ve chosen a low downforce in order to be speedy. This choice seems good on this track with long straights and mainly close turns, while there’re only 2 areas of full throttle turns. On both of them  SAI is paying debts compared to ALO.

We can clearly see on T2, T8 and T13 a great difference between ALO and SAI. ALO can keep pushing to accelerate, while SAI needs to release the gas and lightly brake in order to stay in the track.

Another point to focus is T10-11. ALO is too fast, braking late, in the attempt to gain all he can. As a result he needs to slow much more than SAI and is completely out of trajectory for the following turn, loosing more gap to SAI, giving up all the hopes to close the lap with a good timing.

We can now focus on their team mates of ALO and SAI, just to have a double cross comparison.

The first point is that Ferrari confirms with LEC the top speed results on AstonMartin, but as weel all the difficulties on full throttle turns. On T2-T3 we see all the difficulties of LEC to drive his Ferrari, and he needs to lift his foot from the throttle multiple times in order to stay in the track. The same happens on T8 and T11-12. On each close turn LEC is not able to accelerate early at exit, opening the gap at each turn, most likely for a bad balance of his Ferrari that is not able to create enough grip to win the centrifuge force. Finally on T14, LEC is showing us all his problems today and the difficulties to drive his car.

STR seems to be similar to his team mate, nothing really bad or good to highlight, while LEC is far from SAI, I would say a complete disaster for him. It looks like he has no grip on the track and the car is completely lacking downforces to manage high speed turns at proper level.

Dark day for LEC. Ferrari hopefully will learn a lot from this quali day, and will try to solve most of the issues during the night.

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