Leclerc confident of Ferrari gains

Charles Leclerc says Ferrari made a clear step forward with its car performance in the Austrian Grand Prix despite the pace deficit to McLaren in the race.

Lando Norris was on pole position by over half a second and duly held off teammate Oscar Piastri in a close fight, with Leclerc crossing the line just under 20 seconds behind Norris. Despite that gap, Leclerc believes the form shown in the latter stages of the race was more encouraging, having already been over 14 seconds adrift after making his first pit stop.

“The first stint was poor on our side, but the second and last stint I thought were reasonable,” Leclerc said. “I mean, I was obviously focused on my race, and I didn’t see all the lap times.

“I saw the gap at the end of the race, and it’s not the gap that you would want to see, but that’s unfortunately the gap that we’ve had – if not more – since the beginning of the season. We are working a little bit relative to the others.

“It’s a step forward… I think it helped us to be on the podium. The team has done an incredible job at pushing to try and get them as early as possible, which I hope will make another difference and will help us to be a bit closer to McLaren, to Red Bull in their good days, or to Mercedes even in their good days. So, we are pushing hard.”

Leclerc says he was hampered by car management requirements in the first part of the race, that led to him having a lonely afternoon at the Red Bull Ring.

“There weren’t very many key moments on my side. Obviously, the start – I wish I had done a bit of of a better job to be completely alongside Lando,” he said. “Maybe that would have changed a little bit for three or four laps. I don’t think we had the pace to stay there in front.

“Basically, from Turn 1 one to the end, it was a very boring race. I was on my own, just trying to manage quite a few issues that we had on our side. Let’s not call them ‘issues’ but we’ve got to do some management in the situation we’re in at the moment. I won’t go into detail, but the lift and coast was a little bit frustrating.

“We paid a bit of the price for it on the first stint, but then the second and last stint were a bit more positive, which was good. But there weren’t many key moments apart from the start.”