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After Charles Leclerc pauses to consider his response to a question about how he felt about handling Ferrari’s Formula 1 title race for the first time, he smiles and replies: “Honestly, the title fight is made it quite short!’
It’s been a long day for Leclerc as he sits down to talk to The Race from a room in Maranello, still in his tracksuit after completing a seat fit for the 2023 car, so a bit of levity is welcome.
But, of course, Leclerc doesn’t find it funny that Ferrari had a car capable of challenging for the championship this year, yet his title bid barely made it through the spring.
“It all started very well,” he says.
“Then we had some technical problems one after the other, some wrong strategic decisions in some races and then the mistake in France.
“All these added up. And it was all race after race after race after race. So it was quite difficult to get a grip and then we got to the second half of the season where actually Red Bull took a step forward in terms of performance and has been very strong since we came back from the break.”
Leclerc has known for months that Ferrari’s shortcomings, and the small part he played in it, had doomed a season that started so promisingly in March.
The inevitability surrounding it may have helped take the sting out of Max Verstappen finally wrapping up the title at the last race in Japan, but that doesn’t hide the fact that Ferrari had to deal with some serious weaknesses.
Reliability failures, strategic outcries and the occasional driver error have combined to undermine his efforts this season and allow Verstappen to claim a second title as Red Bull is on the verge of winning the constructors’ crown this weekend.
Leclerc sees everything as one problem. He says “it’s pretty clear” where Ferrari is weak, although the underlying reasons may be different. If you need a hint, Ferrari’s record of 11 pole positions and just four wins might help.
“Our main goal now is to become a better team on Sunday, and that means everything – good calls, good strategy, good communication, good tire management,” said Leclerc.
“That’s all in general, and I think step by step we’re working on all these different things.”
After a challenging season like this, with more races than any other and one in which Verstappen and Red Bull look like they could still win every other Grand Prix, Leclerc would be forgiven for longing for the winter break. But there is more work to do.
While Ferrari has made a big step since 2021 and deserves credit for producing a car and engine capable of fighting at the front again, Leclerc believes it is too easy to say that Ferrari have done the hard part and just need to sort it out your operations.
He reckons it will be just as difficult to “go and find the last details” as it was to get a car with this level of performance. That is why he is not yet ready to let Ferrari remember this wasted season, as he – and the team – believe that the end of the 2022 season could be very important to Ferrari’s hopes of learning its lessons for 2023.
“The team has done an incredible job to make such a step forward in terms of performance from last year to this year,” says Leclerc.
“But I believe the last part is as difficult as the one we did now.
“To go and find the last details, to be a really strong team that comes on Sunday and makes the right calls, the right decisions at the right time, in different conditions, is something extremely important.
“We’ve been working on it a lot over the last three races. And I think we have already taken some steps forward.
“But we have to keep working because, as we saw last Sunday in Suzuka, we are struggling with tire degradation.
“We saw that we definitely took a step forward on Sunday from the last few races, but it’s still not consistent. And we still have to work on it.”
The message is clear: Ferrari has done well to produce a very fast F1 car again, but it needs to get better at racing it. Some of the numbers surrounding how that title was dropped and the extent of the Verstappen/Red Bull turnaround are astounding – with Verstappen winning 11 times and Leclerc only once from Australia (where Leclerc’s points lead was the largest) and Verstappen outscoring Leclerc 341 times -181 during that span, including a six-game winning streak in seven contests.
Leclerc’s biggest contribution to this was crashing out of the French Grand Prix while leading, a moment Verstappen cited as the moment he knew for sure he had beaten Leclerc and would be champion again. Leclerc agrees that was key and sees the mistake as the most difficult memory of his season.
“The hardest moments for me are always my own mistakes, because I’m always very hard on myself and whenever I make a mistake, I always take it worse than when it’s someone else’s,” he says.
“Talking about my mistakes, yes, I made a mistake in France. But talking about the season like I did this year…honestly, you’re always going to be wrong about a season.
“It was expensive because I was obviously in the lead, but it happens.”
Any remaining hope he might have clung to after being thrown out of whack in France was snuffed out a week later in Hungary. Verstappen then won despite starting only 10th, while Leclerc led midway through the stage but missed the podium altogether.
The points gap, Red Bull’s emerging advantage in race performance and the fact that Ferrari knew there were more engine-related penalties to come meant Leclerc knew his title ambitions were all but mathematically over.
“But it didn’t change anything in my motivation,” he insists. “I think that’s where we had to keep our heads up and keep pushing and try to use these last races as best we can to become a better team for next year.”
Leclerc is a cheerful character and often tends to see the glass as half full. Playing Monegasque’s lawyer, at least there are signs that Ferrari can match Red Bull and Mercedes (even eclipse the latter again, eventually) on the technical front.
Leclerc was encouraged by the way Ferrari approached development, even before this season. The team took a nice step up in 2021 from 2020 (its lowest engine contention since 2019), but also progressed through the season. Leclerc says this is enough strength for Ferrari to aim to keep “more or less the same procedures” and expect another step in 2023.
Car development has been a contentious topic in 2022 and has escalated recently amid the budget cap dispute that has engulfed title rival Red Bull. Ferrari has been deliberately cautious with improvements this year and at times expressed almost disbelief at how much Red Bull managed to achieve with the same limited resources.
Leclerc, who kept his head down and kept quiet until it broke, says the tightly controlled development process has been frustrating at times from his perspective, but he believes how Ferrari have handled it.
“It’s not always nice because when you want something in the car, sometimes the guys say no,” he says. “And that’s not the best to hear.
“But at the end of the day, that’s part of the challenge. I like. And I think it’s great the way we’ve been working, especially technically, in the last two years.
“It was two very difficult years for the team. But on the other hand, within the team it was always very clear where our weak points were in the performance car. And we worked on them for this year’s car.
“It’s amazing to see the steps forward.”
This has allowed Leclerc to be a powerful force in Ferrari 2022, which has a very positive front from the moment it hits the track. His ability to handle an oversteer car pairs perfectly with his driving style on the edge and is partly why he has been so effective in qualifying.
It’s a change from the last year or two, as Leclerc admits: “I’ve always struggled with my driving style to have an understeer car” – although some of his performances in more unruly Ferraris suggest otherwise.
And the combination of a car that was inherently more competitive – the most competitive Ferrari Leclerc has driven – and more in tune with his preferences meant that Leclerc relished being part of the leading battle again, even if not developed as he had hoped.
That was the main silver lining in 2022. Even a flawed campaign to challenge for the title is better than what Ferrari has endured over the past two seasons, especially in 2020.
“You’ve always felt pressure when you’re a Ferrari driver,” says Leclerc.
“I’ve always had it. It doesn’t change to be fighting for the top positions this year, if nothing else it feels a little more normal.
“You probably feel even more pressure when you’re fighting for seventh or eighth place with Ferrari because you know the team’s place isn’t there. So you push yourself to get back to the top as quickly as possible.
“It definitely felt nice, at least for me personally. It was a relief to fight for the top positions after two very difficult years.
“Especially after I had my first year at Ferrari and everything was pretty strong. I was fighting mostly for podiums and sometimes for wins.
“But it wasn’t easy to take such a step back in 2020 and 2021. So I’m very glad to be back.”
Leclerc hasn’t been perfect this season and the capacity for the occasional mistake at a high level is still there. But so has Verstappen, who has actually made more unprovoked mistakes than Leclerc this season, albeit on a smaller scale.
Leclerc usually delivered the goods when Ferrari’s car and strategy depended on it. Had the Ferrari been good enough to go the distance, Leclerc would have pushed Verstappen all the way.
Is he good enough to beat him? For a while, it looked like we were going to find out this season. But Ferrari’s problems mean that’s not the case.
Hopefully, though, the answer will come in 2023, which Leclerc insists he will tackle in his best form yet.
“The discipline I had this year was a lot better than my previous years, overall,” he said.
“When I mean discipline, it’s not so much on the track, but mostly off the track, coming home and having the discipline to relax between races, which was something I never knew before this year. Basically, I was always going right and left and would get destroyed from the sixth race onward in the season. And that didn’t help.
“I believe that fighting for victories and taking back podiums also helped me personally. I just feel more accomplished and every year you just learn from the previous experience. I think that’s always been my strength.
“I’ve always been very honest with myself and tried to learn from my mistakes and try to strengthen my weaknesses.
“I think for the first few years it was always very clear where I was. For next year it’s all about working on the details and just trying to improve a little bit in every single area.
“It will matter in the end. But I feel like a much more accomplished driver than I was.”
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