'Tricky' Friday in Bahrain for Ferrari's Leclerc and Sainz

The first day of practice for 2023 proved somewhat trickier than expected for Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, and pole for Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix is already starting to look out of reach.

"I don't think we have the performance maybe for pole," Leclerc told F1TV after the end of today's sessions, adding that the team had been doing a lot of tests today.

In particular, Leclerc was trying out a new version of the controversial 'single pylon' rear wing during the daytime session - but soon found that the wing lacked stability while running at speed on the Bahrain circuit.

"It's like a seesaw!" Leclerc explained over the team radio at one stage, as TV viewers were treated to close-ups some wild three-dimensional oscillations.

New Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur said that the component wouldn't be tried again this weekend - although he stopped short of saying that it was gone for good.

"It’s a test item that we were not able to do last week," he said, referring to the previous three days of pre-season testing at the venue.

"We wanted to test it this morning, but it was not so positive, let’s say," he acknowledged. "We won’t race it again this weekend, but we will be back soon with this concept."

• Read also: Alonso quicker than Perez and Verstappen in Bahrain FP2

Leclerc was fifth fastest at the end of FP1, and improved to fourth once the floodlights came on for the twilight and evening stint. However that was still almost half a second behind pace setter Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin.

"Our first day of free practice went okay," Leclerc insisted. "We completed a lot of laps and I feel more and more comfortable in the car, which is positive.

"The feeling is better than testing. On my side in testing, it's been very inconsistent in the way we run the car because we were testing a lot of things, so I didn't have much time with the car to my liking. I did today."

However Leclerc admitted that Ferrari had "most work to do" getting its car dialled in for this weekend's race, and suggested that "there's a bit of margin" for improvement.

©Ferrari

"It is still difficult to tell where we stand as everyone seems to have been running very different plans, but we are focusing on ourselves and will keep pushing in the right direction."

Sainz was distracted for much of FP1 after suffering a high speed spin and finished bottom of the times. He was top of the timesheets early in FP2 before ending the day back in 14th.

"A trickier Friday than we initially expected," he admitted. "The balance was different and we were changing the car through the sessions to try and correct its main limitations.

"Simply the car is not exactly responding, as I expect or as it did in testing," he complained, adding that he was "struggling a bit more with the balance".

"It's a bit more out of place compared to where it was," he suggested. "But we're having a good look at it. We expect to put it back together for tomorrow."

As for that dramatic spin at turn 9 when the SF-23 briefly bottomed out and lost rear grip after a set-up change, Sainz said: "We were just testing some things in the car, trying to finalise a few things that we wanted to try in FP1.

"[I was] scrubbing the medium tyres, which we wanted to get rid of in FP1, to use the softs in the night session," he explained. "It didn't go to plan, clearly. It wasn't intentional.

"It was a test that went wrong," he shrugged. "I lost a bit of track time, I lost a bit of freedom and probably paid the price in FP2. Still, the car doesn't feel the same as it did in testing.

"[But] it’s only Friday and I’m confident we can analyse everything overnight and take a step forward tomorrow.

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter