Charles Leclerc turned a solid Spanish GP into a podium after a late safety car period. He passed Max Verstappen, who was fighting with hard tyres and nearly went off before making it to the restart. This allowed Leclerc to get alongside early, and gently bumped Verstappen on the way to the overtake with six laps left.
“Full attack” from Leclerc on restart
Looking back after the race, Leclerc saw the opportunity “from the moment where I knew that Max was on a Hard tyre, I was like, ‘OK, that’s not a great tyre to be on for the last five laps’, especially if there’s no saving or whatsoever.So, I knew that it was a full attack for me and that there was an opportunity to finish on the podium.”
“Max went with a lot of commitment in the last corner, lost the rear on exit, and then I was basically side by side, and I was very happy to take the third place. And then we touched on the pit straight.”
”There was nothing special” in contact
While Verstappen felt the contact was something that should have seen them swapped positions back in the heat of the moment, Leclerc called it “nothing special”:
“I overtook on the inside. He tried to squeeze me on the dirty side of the track, then I had the upper hand because I had more speed because of the mistake he had done. And then I was trying to take the slipstream of the McLaren, went a tiny bit to the left. He didn’t seem to want to move at all. And we touched a little bit, but there was nothing special.”
Despite good F1 Spanish GP result, Leclerc says Ferrari still need to improve
Despite back to back podiums, at the moment Leclerc sees results like these as the exception rather than the rule for Ferrari, but said “we are getting there” as they look to close in on McLaren and Max Verstappen.
“I guess we start to understand the car, how we can set it up in order to extract the maximum out of it. But still, we need to go in quite extreme directions, which is not so nice to drive. So, unless we have upgrades very soon, I think it’s going to be difficult to be fighting regularly for podiums.”
