Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc has admitted his team doesn’t have the outright speed to challenge McLaren for this years’ constructors’ championship, but hopes it will still be in the mix through consistency.
While McLaren has been the form team in F1, taking over from Red Bull, Ferrari’s resurgence in recent races has allowed it to remain in outside contention for the world championship.
With six races left to run, McLaren leads Red Bull by 31 points, with Ferrari a further 34 points behind in third.
But while McLaren looks unlikely to run out of steam off the back of Lando Norris’ dominant Singapore Grand Prix performance, Leclerc is refusing to throw the towel just yet, even if on outright speed Ferrari hasn’t been able to keep up.
“I think if we keep being consistent and not having too many missed opportunities, we will do the count at the end and hopefully we’ll be enough to get the constructors’ Consistency can still save Ferrari’s long shot F1 title bid,” Leclerc said after finishing fifth under the Singaporean floodlights.
“But on pure pace, I don’t think we are yet at the level to fight for the constructors. I don’t see ourselves too much in the fight, but if they make mistakes then we might end up in the fight like we are now.”
Charles Leclerc, Scuderia Ferrari
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Leclerc is wary of placing too much stock in Ferrari’s stronger performances over the past three races in Monza, Baku and Singapore, all of which haven’t truly tested whether or not Ferrari has solved the high-speed corner bouncing that have plagued it since the summer.
“As much as the last two races were good, I think we’ve always been saying we need to be careful to not have wrong expectations because McLaren still have a better car than us, like quite a bit, he explained.
“We have some tracks that will be very close, some others where we’ll be further away. Before this race we were quite close and we never really had the fastest car apart from maybe Monaco, and in Monza we were quite strong as well.”
Team-mate Carlos Sainz, who suffered a Q3 crash in Singapore and wasn’t able to recover beyond seventh from 10th on the starting grid, said Ferrari has Red Bull firmly in its sight for second if McLaren turns out to be too far away.
“McLaren definitely has the upper hand that they are the favorites for winning it,” the Spaniard added. “We still have Red Bull in our sights, and obviously McLaren, if they start going south or they start having problems, so we need to keep ourselves in it.”
When asked if beating Red Bull to second place would still be a satisfying outcome for the Maranello squad, he replied: “It would show good resilience by the team after a tough part of the year where we gave up a lot of points and a lot of development curve there.
“But Red Bull is going to come back strong with upgrades at the end of the season once they’ve understood what they did wrong with their car, so it’s not going to be easy to beat them either.”
Additional reporting Ben Hunt
