Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd
Leonardo Fornaroli was left downbeat after his “surprising” lack of pace in qualifying for the F2 feature race at Silverstone.
The Italian driver, who has had four top five starts out of seven rounds, claimed he “didn’t expect to struggle this much” after he could only manage to put his Invicta Racing car 10th on the grid.
Despite that resulting in a reversed-grid pole for the sprint race, the 19 year-old was left disappointed at his performance. “I’m not very happy to be honest and I’m a bit disappointed with today,” Fornaroli told Formula Scout in the Silverstone paddock.
“Qualifying has usually been our strongest point this year so I wasn’t expecting to struggle this much today. I wasn’t feeling 100% okay with the car in practice and that also didn’t allow me to drive relaxed because I was constantly concerned that I’d make a mistake. I wasn’t driving very well but I managed to save the situation a bit with the last lap and get P10.
“I thought I would improve a bit more from free practice to qualifying to be honest I did more or less the same mistakes in qualifying that I did in practice but we try to fix it tomorrow and move on.
“It was a mix of different things, mainly in the high speed section that’s where I left most of the time. For me it was tricky to push on the limit as I wasn’t 100% confident in the car so for sure I left a lot of margin out there in a very tight qualifying like this it’s a big issue.”
With conditions on Friday being extremely windy, Fornaroli implied this remained one of the main reasons he struggled to feel comfortable. “It was affected a lot by the wind especially in the high speed sections,” he said.
“It was dependent on a head or tail wind with the balance was changing a lot lap-by-lap so maybe that was the issue and was one of the things that impacted my confidence.”
With just seven tenths of a second separating the top 10 the field is incredibly close together but, with his title rivals further up the grid than him, Fornaroli recognises the need to maximise the weekend to reduce the damage to his championship charge.
“It will be tricky to win the feature unless there are tricky conditions and we have a perfect strategy,” he admitted. “I would have to be as quick as possible and I would have to study everything with my engineer and get an amazing strategy to win.
“We’re not super far off but it can sometimes help to struggle in improving performances across the season. The weekend hasn’t started yet, now we have two races which is completely different to qualifying so hopefully things can get better.”