Hamilton reveals gearbox issues after Friday's running at Spielberg

After a tough opening day at the Austrian Grand Prix, Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton reckoned that the Italian team is a "huge chunk off pace-wise" while he also revealed that he encountered gearbox issues in the opening practice.

Ferrari had an up-and-down opening day at the Austrian Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton only completed a total of 20 laps in the opening one-hour session as he was hindered by a gearbox issues.

His team-mate Charles Leclerc sat out the opening practice as he handed over his SF-25 to F2 driver Dino Beganovic. The Swedish driver racked up a total of 32 lap, ending up 18th. The Ferrari Academy driver got through his programme without any issues, running both the Hard and Soft compound tyres, and he took on more fuel to try the Soft tyre in race trim towards the end of the session.

In what was his only hour of track time today, Leclerc started work on the Medium tyre before switching to the Soft. The Monegasque ended up fifth quickest in the end.

In between the sessions, the gearbox was changed on Hamilton’ car and he got through his programme, running the Hard tyre followed by the Soft. The seven-time world champion slightly struggled to extract everything from his car on the red-walled tyres and took 10th.

Commenting on his day at Spielberg, Hamilton reckoned: "We missed some running in FP1 due to a gearbox issue, which set us back a little. FP2 went smoother, but we’re still not quite where we want to be in terms of pace. There’s work to do overnight, and we’ll keep looking for the right adjustments with the team.

“But you go out, you can only do one lap, and so we didn’t get the long runs. But I think we recovered okay with it, they did a great job changing the gearbox and getting us ready for FP2."

“Charles was six-tenths off, I was close to a second off, so not ideal. But I think there’s lots of learnings, so I think we will make some changes. Hopefully we can try and get a little bit closer. We won’t be at the front.”

Pressed on whether Ferrari's heavily-modified floor has changed his car's competitiveness, Hamilton said: “A huge amount of work went on to bring the floor, but as you see it’s not necessarily changed our competitiveness.

“The car actually doesn’t feel bad, we’re just a huge chunk off pace-wise, so we need to look into that and that’s about it really. We just keep pushing, just trying to dial the car in more and see what we can get, but it’s obviously very close in the top 10 so a tenth could make a difference, so we’ll work towards trying to gain at least that over the night.”