Ferrari remains hopeful about its championship chances this year despite its poor start to the season, says Charles Leclerc.
The team lies fifth in the standings, albeit tied on points with fourth-placed Williams, after the first two rounds. They suffered a blow in China where Leclerc and team mate Lewis Hamilton were disqualified for technical infringements.
However Leclerc said Ferrari’s underlying performance gives them cause for optimism compared to their situation 12 months ago.
“If we go back to last year, if we look at the first few races, I think the situation in terms of performance was quite a bit worse than where we are now,” he said. “We kind of expected Red Bull to dominate the whole season and obviously by taking the points that were available at the beginning of the season with the performance that we had, we ended the season actually fighting for the championship which was way above our expectations starting the year.”
He said there’s “definitely not this feeling within the team at the moment” that their championship hopes are already looking bleak. “However, there’s definitely the feeling that we haven’t maximised what we could have for these first two races.
“This is frustrating but that doesn’t mean that we cannot recover. We are aware that the season is still very, very long and as I said earlier, small steps after small steps, we can still have an amazing season.”
He said he is “confident” the team has learned from its disqualifications in China. “Whenever you do mistakes you learn from them, and especially when they are costing that much. Obviously everybody is playing with the limit and trying to be as close as possible to it but to have both cars [disqualified] was a big pain and we didn’t need that.
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“At the end of the day It’s been a very difficult part first part of the season. The first two races were difficult, the pace was not exactly where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, hurts the team a lot.
“But I’m confident that we learn from it and obviously whenever these kind of events happen we try and understand and analyse where did that go wrong and change a little bit the process of that. It was a multitude of things adding up which makes that the margin we took was not big enough.”
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