The Monza weekend kicks off with many topics of interest: the new Ferrari power unit, Antonelli’s start from the back, the performances to discover from RedBull and McLaren. The first session was certainly still preliminary, showing us just the starting points of the teams’ weekend work, but not yet the real final potential.
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Ferrari the most dialed in
Starting better than everyone else was definitely the Maranello team: the SF26 appeared very dialed in both from the setup point of view and the well-defined choices on energy deployment, a theme obviously more than central on such a terribly selective track as the one in Brianza. The data shows a Ferrari that, both with Hamilton and Leclerc, after an initial phase of a few laps at low engine regime raised the power bar and, with medium tires, went to test the limits of the car. However, this does not mean that the best time comes only from a high exploitation of the Power Unit. The impression is that the reds were actually the best balanced cars on track, with a fairly soft suspension setup that worked incredibly well in the slow sections, but also with a nice progressive behavior of the suspension tuning that delivered a low and fast car on the straights and reactive in the fast sections. The choices on energy deployment then seem to pay off: Ferrari delivers more energy than the competition on the first straight, between the start of the lap and the first chicane, and then remains more conservative until the exit of Ascari, where on the straight up to the Parabolica it again releases much more energy than practically all the competition (Russell even records 9 km/h less at the braking of the last corner of the track). A strategy that for now seems to work because it maximizes deployment in one of the points where the competition struggles the most, especially giving up the acceleration between Lesmo 2 and Ascari, but partly compensating with a good exit from the second Lesmo indeed.
Second force for now Mercedes but watch out
Russell for now seems the first rival of Leclerc and Hamilton, with a Mercedes that shows an overall deployment similar to Ferrari, albeit distributed exactly the opposite way, that is with little deployment on the first and last straight, and with greater energy use precisely in the central phase of the circuit. Russell also shows himself very effective in fast corners but more struggling in the slow ones, perhaps with a setup for now stiffer that helps precisely on high lateral loads but suffers a bit on the curbs of the chicanes. For now Mercedes does not show very high power peaks neither with Russell nor with Antonelli (who we do not know if he has already mounted the new engine in the car, which we recall will be of the same specification as the previous one), so the Anglo-German team definitely has margin from that point of view.
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It is still early anyway to exclude both McLaren and RedBull from the fight for the positions that matter. Absent Verstappen due to rookie rotation, Lawson recorded an excellent time, then proving, data in hand, particularly fast in the Lesmo two section, where, to be honest, one would not expect a competitive RedBull, and this shows that the Milton Keynes team could play for the important positions, at least in qualifying. After that McLaren still appeared in optimization phase but with some difficulties, as is known, in the slower corners, which at Monza weigh significantly on the final time. However, be careful that in the race simulation the average pace are all close: Antonelli, Russell, Leclerc and Norris have done stints whose average is overall 92 thousandths apart, giving the idea of what could be a substantial balance that would make the whole weekend particularly exciting. Let’s now see how the performances will evolve and what power relations we will see on track in the second free practice session.
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