The words of the Ferrari team principal
There Ferrari he started 2026 by getting on the podium with Charles Leclerc at the end of an Australian GP which also saw Lewis Hamilton in excellent form, finishing in fourth place very close to his teammate.
The team principal Frederic Vasseur defined the outcome as positive at the end of the weekend in Melbourne and China could also see the Macarena winger glimpsed for now in the tests in Bahrain. The number one on the Ferrari wall thus presented the weekend in Shanghai which will follow the Sprint format, thus granting only one free practice session to the teams and drivers before having to push in the Sprint Qualifying.
“The Chinese Grand Prix comes immediately after Melbourne and represents a different challenge from many points of view – Vasseur’s words – it is a Sprint weekend, so we will have very little time on the track to work on the cars, and this will make the preparation done in Maranello and in the simulator even more important. We are only at the beginning of this new era of Formula 1: the 2026 cars are very different from those we have known in recent years and each session allows us to learn something new about how to manage them, both from a set-up and energy point of view. In Australia we have seen encouraging signsbut we know that the level is very high and that there is still a lot of work to do. Our goal for Shanghai is to continue to progress, collect data, stay focused on ourselves and put together a clean weekend in all its phases.”
