18/04/2025
NEWS STORY
Scuderia Ferrari HP got through all its Friday programme in free practice for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix on the high speed Jeddah Corniche circuit.
Part of today's plan was to let the drivers do as many laps as possible to get to grips with the track and its pitfalls, with the very close walls, limited run-off areas and a track surface that was constantly evolving the more it got rubbered in. In the second session, run at the same time at which qualifying takes place tomorrow, the teams focused more on fine tuning the set-up, with Charles and Lewis working meticulously even if, as is the case for everyone on this particularly challenging track, there is still more work to be done.
Leclerc and Hamilton began on Medium tyres, doing a few laps to get back in the swing of this track, with times of 1'30"592 and 1'30"674, before switching to Softs with which they set their best times: Charles was third with a 1'29"309 and Lewis was eighth in 1'29"815. Towards the end of the session, both drivers switched to the Mediums from the start of the hour and took on a heavier fuel load to run in race configuration. Charles completed 28 laps, Lewis did 27 for a total of 55 laps.
As in FP1, the Scuderia pair began on new Mediums before switching to Softs with which the Englishman posted a 1'29"371, 13th fastest, while his team-mate lapped in 1'28"749 on his third run to claim fourth place. Once again, towards the end of the session, both SF-25s were fuelled up to run in race trim on the Mediums from earlier in the session. However, they were only able to complete two laps before the session was red flagged after Yuki Tsunoda crashed. Once the light was green again there was just time to go out to do a practice start on the grid. Charles completed 22 laps, Lewis did 23 for a total of 45.
Charles Leclerc: We are missing a bit of pace compared to the cars in front of us, but if we put everything together tomorrow it should be a close Qualifying.
We all seem to be quite close, with McLaren a step ahead, but we will focus on ourselves and see what we can extract tomorrow.
Lewis Hamilton: It was a challenging day. We're still chasing the right balance between the front and rear axles, and I'm struggling a bit with consistency across the lap at this stage.
There's work to do tonight, but the team's fully focused and we'll keep pushing to find the improvements we need.
Check out our Friday gallery from Jeddah here.