Charles Leclerc says Ferrari maximised its results in recent races, but they are faltering due to general lack of pace against its rivals.
Having started the 2024 F1 season on a sound note, the Ferrari campaign dropped on its heals as the season progressed. The updates brought about in Canada seemingly didn’t work and it has been playing catch-up ever since for the Italian outfit.
The high-speed bouncing returned and since that race, Ferrari has been experimenting to better balance the car for the races. They dropped pace and lost out to the likes of Red Bull, McLaren and even Mercedes in the pecking order.
But the last two weekends, they gained some lost ground to maximise result despite the general lack of pace. “Our first half really good,” said Leclerc to media. “I think we couldn’t hope for better. We maximised the potential of the car. Then we’ve had four races where we’re going extreme setups from extreme setups.
“And for me, it was just impossible to get to quali and to know where the limit of the car was. And we lost a lot of points. And the last two races, we focused again on maximising the results, and I think we did, but just not fast enough, as I said. So that’s where we really need to focus and to do a step for the second half if we want to have any better results.
“We went through tough moments with the team, we went through better moments with the team at the moment. Obviously looking at the last four or five races we are in a moment where we have struggled more apart from the last race, which I consider quite a good one where we maximised our potential.
“Of course, we know that we have to improve our potential because for now it’s just not good enough. But we own it. And that doesn’t demotivate us, if anything it motivates us even more to come back to a good level of performance and to see again the winning trophy.
“There’s a big motivation in the team and I hope that the struggling moments will be the emotional possible. It was super helpful for us to experiment and to try different things in order to understand really well our issues and for the future it will help us to for the development of the car.
“However, after three, four difficult weekends, that’s enough points lost. So from Budapest on we really said to ourselves okay, maybe we stop the experimenting, we’ve learned enough and now we’ve got to focus on maximizing our performance. We did quite a good job in Budapest. And now it’s really the target once again to just maximise the car that we have,” summed up Leclerc.
The Monegasque was also surprised by McLaren’s less dominating run in Belgian GP, where Leclerc finished third while holding off the likes of Max Verstappen and Lando Norris. Even with that bit of result, he concedes that Ferrari is behind and have work cut out.
“I personally thought that McLaren had huge advantage of pace for Spa, which I saw a little bit less in the race,” said Leclerc. “They were still the fastest, probably with Red Bull and Mercedes today, but I thought McLaren had the edge. It’s good to see that everybody’s so close, but unfortunately, we are still the fourth fastest team.
“And the top three keeps changing, but we are consistently behind them, on a par with Mercedes. We just need more pace. When you see the pace of Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren in the race, I don’t think so. I think two or three-tenths. So yeah, we started on pole, and we still finished P4 [P3].
“With my car, I felt like we were on for a podium in Spa. And then as soon as everyone put their hards on, you could see which pace everyone was doing, and even though my last stint, I felt very competitive and quick, then when they told me the lap times of the others, I was not quite as quick as I thought I was,” summed up Leclerc.
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