Ferrari drivers blame windy conditions for ill-handling in French GP F1 practice

Despite its struggles, both drivers ended FP2 inside the top ten with Leclerc in fifth, while Sainz was eighth fastest.

As predicted by Leclerc going into the weekend, Ferrari doesn’t seem to have the pace it enjoyed in Monaco or Baku - where it scored back-to-back pole positions.

Reflecting on his afternoon, Leclerc revealed that the strong winds made the handling of his Ferrari “quite tricky to drive”.

“Just overall, with the car balance,” Leclerc said. “It’s been a very difficult day for everyone, I think, the wind is very, very strong, so it makes it quite tricky to drive, but it’s like this for everyone, so you just to try and find a way around it and I think in FP2 it was a little bit better.

“But let’s say that this is more in line with what we expected here. I think Baku and Monaco were two weekends that were much better than what we expected and now we’re a bit more in line with what we expected.”

Leclerc identified McLaren, Alpine and AlphaTauri as Ferrari’s main rivals for this weekend.

“We thought we would be fighting with McLaren, Alpine and AlphaTauri and that’s the case for tomorrow,” Leclerc added.

Sainz's spin in FP1 at Turn 2 highlighted the difficulties drivers were facing in practice, with Mick Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel all having offs during the morning session.

The Spaniard explained in more detail how the strong wind was affecting Ferrari at Paul Ricard.

“The problem is that the wind is coming from the worst possible direction for this circuit, which means you have a headwind in all the straights, so you’re slow in all the straights and then you get a tailwind in all the corners, so it makes it challenging, it makes it slower also compared to 2019, when we had the wind coming from the opposite side and it makes it quite inconsistent, easy to make mistakes, but it’s the same for everyone, so hopefully we can adapt better,” Sainz said.