Leclerc: The car is fast, but it needs more stability.

      The weekend in Monza, at Ferrari’s home circuit, the Scuderia’s drivers got off to a good start — both in the top five, with Charles Leclerc less than a tenth off Friday’s best time. The Italian team emphasised that today’s practice programme was completed in full, although track activity was interrupted by red flags.

      Charles Leclerc (2nd): “Today our car did not show consistent behaviour on track either on a light fuel load or with a full tank. But it’s still quick, and that’s better than the alternative. Tomorrow we need to work on short runs to extract the maximum from the SF-25, and we also need to gain in stability. I expect qualifying to turn into a very intense battle, as it did here a year ago, but so far everything is going well, and I think we’ll be able to fight for a good result tomorrow.”

      Lewis Hamilton (5th): “Working at the Monza circuit in front of grandstands full of tifosi is a very special experience. You can feel both genuine passion and powerful energy here. In the first session the car made quite a good impression, and when I finished the session with the fastest time that encouraged me. Between sessions we made a number of setup changes, and now we need to analyse everything carefully because there’s no certainty that they moved us in the right direction. However, we still have time before tomorrow to put things right. It looks like our pace is decent, and we were able to collect valuable information on the behaviour of all three tyre compounds, so the priority now is to understand how we can continue to increase our speed. I’m confident the team can make progress this evening, and we’ll continue preparing for tomorrow’s qualifying.”