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Charles Leclerc has admitted that he just needs to move on from the incident at the 2022 F1 French GP rather than dwell on it.
The Ferrari driver was leading the race at Circuit Paul Ricard when all of a sudden he made a mistake, went off the track, and crashed into the barriers. With his championship rival Max Verstappen going on to win the race, this has opened up a 63-point deficit for the Monegasque in the championship with just 10 races left.
Speaking to the press in the lead-up to the 2022 F1 Hungarian GP, Leclerc said:
“There’s nothing that will help me, dwelling on my mistake or staying in the past on that mistake. No, I did that mistake, it cost me lots of points, I’m aware of it, and that’s it. Now, I just need to move on, focus 100 per cent for this weekend, try to do the best possible, try to win this race, and then I’m sure it will go well.”
Looking forward to the weekend in Hungary, Charles Leclerc said:
“I think we’ll have a strong car. I think Paul Ricard and Budapest are two tracks where I struggled a bit more in the past, personally, but Australia [also used to be] the case, and in the end, I managed to have a great weekend. So I hope that this weekend, I can also turn things around.”
The Ferrari driver further went on to talk about the crash and what was going on at that point, saying:
“The real pressure, I had it when Max was really behind. And then [by Lap 18], Max had already moved to a non-optimal strategy, so I just had to push and focus on my own race, which I was doing. But then, obviously, when you are fighting with the limits, sometimes mistakes can happen, and I think this is a kind of mistake where I just went too far, and that’s it.”
Charles Leclerc's crash is something very rare to happen in F1
BBC F1 broadcaster Jack Nicholls feels that the particular crash in which Charles Leclerc lost control on a dry track is a rare occurrence. He also talked about how the points swing at Circuit Paul Ricard was not the first of the season.
The Briton said:
“The problem for Ferrari is that there have been quite a lot, but this one’s just the huge swing from 30 points, where it could have been, to 63. It’s up there with Vettel crashing out in Hockenheim all those years ago in the rain and, honestly, spinning from the lead of the race in the bone dry is so, so rare, because I remember we had this conversation when Vettel spun out.”
“We were having this conversation of ‘when was the last time a driver crashed out from the lead’ and, OK, in that scenario, well it was a bit wet. But you’re thinking back to [Mika] Hakkinen when he crashed out of the lead in Imola in ’99. It’s so so rare in Formula 1, that a driver just loops it by himself.”
Charles Leclerc is currently looking at a mountainous 63-point deficit against Max Verstappen in the drivers' championship. It will be interesting to see how he bounces back from it this weekend before F1 takes its summer break.
