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Charles Leclerc has come out with a quite confident outlook amidst his recent qualifying struggles, with claims that he tends to find solutions quickly when he works on something.
The Ferrari driver has not had the best start to the season, struggling to find the sweet spot in qualifying compared to his teammate in the last two races.
This comes across as a major surprise because Charles Leclerc has made his name in F1 as arguably one of the best qualifiers in F1. Yet, he's been out-qualified by Carlos Sainz in the last two races in Melbourne and Japan. This has resulted in a compromised final result for Charles in the race.
In Australia, while Charles Leclerc had an underwhelming qualifying session, his teammate Carlos Sainz ended up clinching the pole position. This difference was even more pronounced in Suzuka as Charles could only qualify in P8 and finished behind his teammate in P4.
Talking to Sky Sports F1 after the race, Charles Leclerc was quite confident of what the future held for him in terms of improvements in qualifying.
In arguably the rarest signs of arrogance from the Ferrari driver, Leclerc claimed that he tends to find a solution whenever he puts his mind to something and is not too worried. He said:
"It’s not very often in my career that I had to focus on qualifying pace because it’s normally one of my strengths, but Australia and here, this is where I’ve been struggling, so I will focus on that. But normally when I work on something, I get better quite quickly, so I’m confident I’ll make improvements quickly."
He added:
“I think I’ve always been described as a very fast driver in qualifying, not so much in the race. I think this year I’m not doing something crazy different, it’s just that we have a car that is much better in a race, that is much nicer on its tyres. We’ve been working on that and we think that we understood the direction in which we need to go to with the car in order for us to have an easier life in the race."
Charles Leclerc's analysis of the F1 Japanese GP
While giving his analysis of the race, Charles Leclerc felt that the race weekend got disrupted in qualifying, where he only had P8 as a grid position. And while he did execute a brilliant race, the best he could have hoped for was P4, which is where he finished. He said,
“I think as a driver you always have to do a step back and look at the weekend as a whole. There’s one thing that we could have done better, which is the way we are preparing the tyres for the qualifying lap, because as I said yesterday, I was happy with the lap, but I just didn’t have enough grip available."
He added,
"And this is mostly coming from the lap before trying to get the tyres in the right window. And from that moment that puts us in a very difficult situation for the rest of the weekend, because starting P8, you cannot do much more."
Charles Leclerc will be hoping to put his bad form to rest in the next race in China as the F1 circus moves on to the next round.
