McLaren dominated Friday’s Free Practice at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The Papaya team was solid on both the soft tyre and the long runs. Ferrari must be worried about the F1 data presented by the day as their chances of fighting for the Constructors’ Championship fade away.

Lando Norris set the fastest time of Free Practice 2 in Abu Dhabi with a time of 1:23.517 followed by Oscar Piastri. The Woking-based team dominated the most significant session of the whole weekend as its time coincides with the race start time on Sunday and the one with the most similar conditions to the qualifying time as well.

F1 data: Ferrari facing uphill challenge to fight McLaren for Constructors’ crown

Ferrari, in addition to presenting unpromising data, confirmed today the battery replacement on Charles Leclerc’s car, which means a 10-place grid penalty on Sunday.

The Italian team must make up a 21-point gap to McLaren in the race and this penalty only makes things more complicated as even with pure pace on a level playing field it was already going to be an extremely difficult mission.

Carlos Sainz finished the FP2 session in P4. The Spanish driver, who is making his last race with Ferrari this weekend, was +0.582s slower than Norris. The big difference in the performance of both cars lies in cornering where the MCL38 in the slow speed corners was very competitive, allowing Norris to brake late but still achieve great traction.

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Ferrari nevertheless had a better top speed than McLaren. The Italian team, forced to make a comeback, will have to opt for a more aggressive car set-up this weekend, but one that allows them to have extra speed to try to overtake at the Yas Marina Circuit even though this means a worse tyre management.

Turn 1, a fast fifth gear corner with an aggressive 90-degree left-hand turn, is the point where Ferrari suffered the most compared to McLaren, losing up to two tenths of a second at this early point. From there, the delta increased in Sector 2 and Sector 3 to accumulate a delta of more than half a second, which was only slightly reduced at the end of the straight.

In terms of race pace, McLaren also seems to be the team to beat. The engine map chosen by each driver and team and the fuel load level of each one is unknown.

For example, we can intuit that Nico Hülkenberg has run with much less fuel than the other drivers as well as using the soft tyre, that Oscar Piastri has also run with less fuel than Norris… but we don’t know the real fuel load difference between the teams.

What is clear is that the higher temperatures in the Abu Dhabi desert play in favour of McLaren’s interests with 27° Celsius in the air and 33° Celsius on track. Similar temperatures are expected for Sunday.

And the big problem for Ferrari is that Red Bull and Mercedes also look competitive. And in this sense, this is very bad news for Charles Leclerc who will have to make an important comeback on Sunday with a 10 place grid penalty. It looks like the Italian team is facing an impossible mission to clinch its first Constructors’ Championship since 2008.

McLaren, after paying the consequences of a very ineffective race management in Qatar, has everything to play for to celebrate its first title since 1998 with Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard as drivers.

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are set to make history in 2024 along with Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, who is looking forward to erasing the bad memories from the title fight with Fernando Alonso, who lost the battle to Sebastian Vettel on this very stage in 2010 when Stella worked as a race engineer for the Spanish driver at Ferrari.

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