Charles Leclerc says he worked on his weakness of being impatient to be better in F1 2024, as he adds on managing expectation of Ferrari potentially winning the title.
Ferrari’s Leclerc admits that he has been impatient in the past which hurt his chances in the course of a F1 season. His early career saw him losing out at key moments of a grand prix weekend and or during important sessions, which hurt not only him but also the team.
But in 2024, Leclerc thinks he has managed to get on top of it which has helped in consistent results. He still feels the pinch sometimes, though, because he goes for that extra tenth which leads to crashes. “I think my main weakness when I got to Ferrari was being very impatient and sometimes it still bites me,” he said to media.
“I feel like I found the right balance because I cannot either be happy to be a tenth off and I will always do absolutely everything in order to get that tenth, even if that means that sometimes I go over the limit and crash. But this is probably where I’ve learned the most, it’s to try and find that balance.
“Yes, sometimes it will happen that I’ll go over the limits, but I know that over the course of the season it pays more often to have that approach than to just be happy being off for a weekend. But as I said, yeah, it’s just trying to find that right balance and at the end of the season having the most possible points.
“And I think that this year that approach was the right one,” summed up Leclerc. Apart from his own driving, he also noted about the overall improvements from Ferrari in 2024. He thinks the car now has better balance, similar to how they were couple of years ago.
Due to the better results, Ferrari is in a good spot to fight for the F1 title. That brings added pressure, but Leclerc reckons being a Ferrari driver, he is always under pressure to deliver which has helped him to manage it well now. “Obviously, we are getting better and better,” he said. “I think last year was a very difficult year.
“Two years ago, we were in a better place in terms of balance. But now we are getting back to this kind of balance. But the balance doesn’t mean much. I mean, you can have a very competitive car and a very difficult car to drive. And at the end, what matters is the lap time. It’s not how good I feel in the car.
“Sometimes the two goes together, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a car feels very, very difficult to drive. However, if it feels better than others and that you are faster, then it’s good enough. The balance is so much better than a year ago. I think we’ve been struggling in 2023 with the balance of the car.
“We’ve done quite a lot of work on that, and it definitely feels like a big step forward compared to last year. But we are slowly going in the right direction and trying to keep improving, obviously. Regarding pressure, I think I’ve learned to deal with it. Because when you drive for a team like Ferrari, I’ve always said that I think one of the best things of a team like Ferrari is the passion.
“And people at the factory won’t count the extra hours they’ve got to put in. However, sometimes this exact same passion can be difficult to manage, because passion means also emotions, and it means that in good times you go super high with the emotions, but in the difficult times you take it a lot more, it’s a lot more difficult to deal with it.
“However, now it’s since 2019, I’m with the team, and we’ve been working a lot on that, and I think we are much more prepared to face those kind of ups and downs. And I don’t think we are as influenced by the outside noise around the team than we were maybe two, three, four years ago. So on that, I don’t think that it has any influence.
“And actually, we don’t really realize that inside the team. We are just motivated and happy about the actual situation because we are in a good place and we are working in the right direction, but we don’t really pay attention to what’s being said outside,” summed up Leclerc.
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