Charles Leclerc secured a P5 starting spot for the F1 Spanish GP, keeping it clean through the very tough Madring. The Ferrari man started his Q1 with an early P2, ultimately finding himself not on par with the Mercedes and McLaren drivers and dropping to the second half of the top ten.
A smooth Qualifying overall for Leclerc, who anticipates drama in the F1 Spanish GP
Advancing through Q2, his recorded laps allowed him to consistently remain within reach of the top three, even with track evolution not playing a significant role in the later part of the session. While at first Leclerc’s final Q3 time of 1:32.019 had initially left him in second place, firstly his teammate Hamilton had bested him by 0.006s.
Ultimately, Verstappen, Antonelli and Norris all went faster than him too, whereas Russell remained behind the Monegasque. All in all, Leclerc considered himself content with the outcome of his Qualifying session for the Spanish GP, especially taking into account the fact that several of his rivals, including the championship leader, had fresher power units. He had to revert to an older spec following his error at Monza last Sunday.
“A little bit, but as well I think most of the people put a new power unit or a new spec for today and I kind of had the same spec for… That’s on me obviously for last week, so maybe I didn’t do the step forward that the others did on that side. Having said that, I think the lap was quite clean, I’ve had a few moments here and there in which I maybe lost a little bit.
“When I see how close it is, it’s frustrating, but at the same time I feel like if you ask to any driver on the grid today everybody probably can find something on the lap. “
Leclerc didn’t expect a Norris pole in Madrid
Asked whether he could have anticipated a pole from Norris at the Madring, with the McLaren man never leading a session thus far and the team looking around 0.4-0.5 off throughout the weekend, Leclerc was unsure, admitting he was focusing on his own performance.
“It must have been a very good lap because, obviously. When I’m doing my qualifying, I look at myself and I don’t look too much around, but I didn’t feel like Lando was dominating before that. On that last lap he managed to put the lap at the right moment, but I haven’t seen much more of that, so I was a little bit surprised. But, honestly, [I was] just very much focused on myself.”
The Ferrari man, aiming at a strong race performance following a severe crash last week at Monza, focused on the more troublesome aspects of his Qualifying laps at the Madring, admitting his worst sector was the first one. Both the Monegasque and his British stablemate had been rapid through the middle one throughout Saturday, before dropping away in the last sector also.
“From what I’ve seen, actually, it was more the first sector on my side. Maybe on Lewis it was the other way around, but I lost like four tenths in sector one on my fast lap, so we’ve got to look at that. My outlaps were not ideal but four tenths is a lot so I don’t really know what went on there. Surely there are many straights but I doubt that we are losing four tenths in the straights.”
Looking after the tyres and turn 5 to be key on Sunday
Tyre management will be a key area tomorrow during F1’s first ever race in Madrid, according to Leclerc, who has highlighted the main difficulties encountered throughout the earlier practice sessions.
“Yes, one hundred percent. Then, it’s true also that on these tracks, track evolution is quite big normally from Friday to Sunday, so we’ll see how much it evolves. Yesterday was by far the worst track of the season for degradation, and even though it’s a difficult track to overtake on, if we have that amount of degradation, overtaking might be possible.”
Drama… but not too much
However, in spite of the several red flags and high speed crashes encountered so far at the Spanish GP before Qualifying, Leclerc believes the actual race will not be as intense and as incident prone as the Azerbaijan round. Even if notable names have crashed out so far, including Bearman, Hamilton, Albon, and more, the Silverstone race winner argues that the Baku street circuit is much more intense.
“I wouldn’t use those extreme ends but surely… I don’t know about the chaos in a way. Maybe some red flags or some incidents on a track that is so challenging like this one. However, Baku can be quite crazy with overtakes, which here I struggle to see many, many overtakes.”
In his opinion, among the areas to be revised for the upcoming season of the newly debuting Madring should include Turn 5, due to the rather tricky combination of high kerbs, and the fact overtaking is virtually impossible there because of the nature of the corner, as shown in F2 and F3.
“With these cars it’s just a bit of an awkward corner with the kerbs. The kerbs are quite high and it’s not such a nice corner, so I think there’s probably something to be done there. Generally it’s a really, really cool track. There’s just maybe some tweaks that we can do to improve at least overtaking.”
