Max Verstappen was fifth and Daniel Ricciardo sixth in the first free practice in German Grand Prix on Friday.
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The Scuderia Ferrari driver felt he struggled to extract pace from his SF16-H in a hard qualifying session at the Hockenheimring, and was baffled to why the balance of his vehicle was not as a strong as it had been earlier in the weekend.
“Our vehicle was behaving pretty nicely today and I was happy with the handling” he went on.
“We’re just not fast overall” said Kimi Raikkonen, who will start as the lead of the Ferrari pair, “we need to put more downforce on the auto to go faster”. On the last set of tyres I struggled a bit and I didn’t have the same good feeling I had with the previous one. It’s disappointing to be where we are, but this is how it is today.
“We’ll try to get into the points, improve from where we’ll be starting”.
“We know Mercedes is in superb form at the moment and it is very hard”. We just need to be faster around the lap. We try to make a good start and go from there.
“I don’t think it’s easy to overtake in any track, you have to be quick enough to overtake but for sure it should be easier than in Hungary”.
“I think we don’t have to hide, in terms of race pace we are fast, then it should be an interesting race”.
“Hopefully whatever we’ll do will be correct and we play it the right way”.
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“We’re here to challenge for pole on Saturday and to win on Sunday. So we’ll see where we end up”.
