Charles Leclerc has said the lack of Ferrari pace was “strange” around China as the team struggled to match the frontrunners.
Leclerc came home a respectable 4th with his teammate just behind in Shanghai. Despite this, the Monegasque driver was unhappy with the performance on the car throughout the weekend.
“I don’t think are found it as a team, especially on the hard tyres’” said Leclerc post-race.
“It’s very strange because with Lando at first I thought we were going to fight with him.”
The Ferrari has been kind to its tyres so far and has done well in all conditions. The Italian team seemed to be the second best car on the grid, until the Chinese Grand Prix.
“I think we were expecting this weekend to be similar or in line with what we had seen since the beginning of the season, but we were struggling a lot more.” he said.
With Carlos Sainz unable to beat his teammate, like he has done for most of the season so far, it seemed the car rather than the driver was the issue.
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‘McLaren are getting stronger’
4th and 5th place is hardly a catastrophic weekend. The team just need to look at Mercedes failures if they want to feel better about their car.
However, the pace of the McLaren will be a concern with the team just behind Ferrari in the WCC.
“We did not expect them to be as strong,” admitted Leclerc.
“On this race, maybe a bit early to draw conclusions. But this weekend they were stronger than what we thought.”
Ferrari will need to improve their hard tyre pace, in particular if they are going to compete consistently at the front.
Formula 1 heads to the USA for the first out of three races to take place in the country this year.
Leclerc is hoping sunny Miami will work better for the car than it did in Shanghai.
“We’ll be working on trying to understand what was going on with the hard today to try and fix that,”
“The upgrades are going to be important t o see how the season will develop after that.”
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