It was a tough day in the office for Ferrari, who have been struggling all weekend so far to extract the maximum pace from their SF-25. This reached a head in qualifying, as even on a new set of the C6 soft tyres, they were pushed out of Q2 by two Aston Martins using the C5, medium tyres.

“[I’m] very disappointed, especially at home, at such a special Grand Prix for the team, it just hurts, it would have hurt anyway, whatever [the] track, but here it hurts even more. I have no words about our performance today,” said a downbeat Charles Leclerc following the elimination.

Hamilton echoed Leclerc’s thoughts about the session, saying it was made all the worse by the fact he felt they’d made positive steps to this point.

“Ultimately, I feel super gutted, devastated, that we weren’t able to get through. I really feel we’ve made many positive steps over the weekend,” he said.

While their brake and rear end issues seemed to compromise their overall pace, it was the behaviour of the new C6 compound tyre that really impacted Ferrari’s performance.

Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal, said, “the situation was strange for everyone today, but it seemed to affect us more than the others.”

The peakiness of the C6 compound, which looked to be too soft for most cars out there, meant managing its temperature even over a single lap was a challenge.

For Ferrari, this resulted in their quickest run of Q2 being set on their first set of the soft tyre from Q1, seemingly finding that a used set had more stability for pace extraction than a new one.

But where Ferrari were left disappointed by their early exit, Aston Martin were elated to have both cars into Q3 for the first time since the Dutch Grand Prix last year. Fernando Alonso said he was “proud” of the result, while Lance Stroll said it was a “good day” where everything came together.

And ultimately it seemed to come down to their decision to risk using the medium tyre in Q2, bolting new sets onto each car for their final flying laps of the second part of qualifying.

They repeated the strategy in Q3, using a scrubbed set on each car to allow them to push up the timing sheet to end P5 and P8 for Alonso and Stroll, respectively.

When questioned about this strategy post-session and whether these kinds of different strategies are what’s needed to put Aston Martin ahead, Fernando replied, “Yeah, let’s see tomorrow, because I think we were competitive also on the soft tyre, we were doing one soft [run], one medium [run] in each Quali session.”

“Because of that we didn’t know which tyre was faster, so we opted to run both compounds in all the sessions, like this you cover all the alternatives, and I think on both runs we were always progressing through Qualifying, so I think we were generally fast today. We need to confirm tomorrow.”

This weekend was aimed at being a data gathering exercise for the C6’s from Pirelli’s point of view, ahead of its use in Monaco and Montreal and potentially other street circuits like Singapore later in the year.

Mario Isola, Pirelli’s Motorsport Director, concluded that the performance between the C5 and C6 was “relatively small” as they had predicted based on the limited existing on-track data they had on C6 compound, which allowed for this pattern where it was faster than the C6 at times. As this is the teams’ first time using it on the current cars, Isola said they still “need to understand [the C6] better in order to get the most out of it”.

“This meant that some drivers preferred to go with the C5, a compound they know well, given that it was already the qualifying tyre for the previous two races in Jeddah and Miami,” he said.

“They chose to sacrifice a bit of grip in exchange for the lap time advantage that comes from the predictability of a tyre with which they have more experience and more data.”

Aside from the tyres, Aston Martin also have a new, relatively comprehensive upgrade package this weekend that they feel has performed well so far, and has likely also played into this pace improvement.

“Definitely the new parts that we brought here, they’re performing well, we saw yesterday when we tested them and today’s the confirmation,” said Alonso.

Even so, Alonso maintained that the team “need to keep the feet on the ground”, suggesting cautious optimism about this progress as “maybe Imola’s a good track” for them.

“We need to wait for different tracks. But [I’m] happy for the team, proud of them. They’ve been working hard and this upgrade hopefully brings some motivation to the team,” said the Spaniard.

All eyes turn to the Grand Prix to see if Aston Martin’s pace holds true over longer stints where they need even further improvements, and if it does, both drivers could be on for their best finishing positions of the season so far…