Autobayng News Team
Ferrari failed to keep pace with their rivals on car development, Charles Leclerc has admitted, as the team faces ending the season without a win.
Ferrari was one of four teams which scored multiple race wins last year. However they remain winless this year while McLaren, Red Bull and Mercedes have all taken at least two grand prix victories.
Leclerc is pessimistic about their chances of winning any of the last six rounds this year. “It’s very tough,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “We are not strong at the moment and we are struggling massively with the car.
“It’s not easy. I wish I could say that I’m positive for the rest of the season [but] I don’t think there’s anything in the car at the moment that proves [to] me that we are going to do a step forward.
“And I think this is the reality of our situation at the moment. I don’t quite know how to turn that situation around because we don’t have new parts or anything coming to the car.”
Ferrari have made progress, said Leclerc, but he believes Red Bull and Mercedes’ success in the last three rounds shows they have been left behind.
“I was surprised at the beginning of the season, then you start to work to try and find solutions to that, and we did,” he said. “We did steps forward but the others did as well so the gaps stayed kind of the same.
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“Then Red Bull did two steps in the season, first half and then in Monza more recently, where they did a really big step forward. And now Mercedes seems to have done this step forward and we are the only one that didn’t find that solution.”
Leclerc’s team mate Lewis Hamilton also believes the team has been out-developed by his rivals.
“We’re currently really limited with rear end, compared to the guys that are clearly taking the step and improved their rear, Mercedes and McLaren and Red Bull,” said Hamilton.
“The guys are pushing so hard each weekend,” he added. “I feel pain for all the team, from catering to marketing to the guys in the garage and engineers who show up every weekend and they really do give absolutely everything.
“But the car we have is just not, unfortunately, at the level of the guys up ahead of us. Particularly as they’ve had some upgrades and we can’t match them. So we’re on a knife-edge trying to get as close as we can.”
Both Ferraris finished outside the top 10 in Singapore. Hamilton said the team could have got more from their car but he doesn’t believe a much better result was possible.
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“There was potential for us to be further ahead this weekend,” he said. “I think in qualifying I’m still not extracting the full potential of the car. We didn’t in the last race and we didn’t this weekend.
“There was potential to have been third or fourth on the grid this weekend if we had extracted the tyre performance and not queued at the end of the pit lane, for example. In the race I think we were kind of on par pace-wise with at least a couple of cars ahead of us, but obviously not quicker.
“So I think if we can get our qualifying fixed, which is very very hard to do against these quick cars, then maybe we can get slightly better results. But ultimately we’re still fighting for fourth, fifth, sixth, at best.”
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