Three races into the season, Ferrari supporters had good reason to believe Charles Leclerc would deliver the first championship for one of their drivers in 15 years.
He’d opened his account with two wins and a second place, the latter a narrow defeat to Max Verstappen in Saudi Arabia. Red Bull suffered reliability problems in the other races which kept the champion from scoring.
At this early stage in proceedings, Leclerc was already 34 point clear of his closest rival, and Verstappen lagged 46 off the lead. But since then the situation has dramatically reversed.
Red Bull are undefeated in six straight races and Verstappen has built up an imposing lead. Meanwhile Leclerc has fallen to third in the standings, and may no longer be the driver Verstappen has to worry about the most.
Is Leclerc still the driver most capable of beating Verstappen to the championship, or is another rival emerging which represents a greater threat?
Sergio Perez
Going into the first season under F1’s drastically overhauled regulations, Perez hoped the complete reset in Red Bull’s design would help him find greater confidence at the wheel of their car. That has proved to be the case.
He’s narrowed the gap to Verstappen in qualifying and even took the first pole position of his career in Saudi Arabia, where his hopes of victory were dashed by the Safety Car. Another potential win passed him by in Spain, where Red Bull were quick to instruct him to let his team mate past after Verstappen spun, only for Perez to then lose time behind the team’s other car as it was plagued by a DRS fault.
So it’s fair to say Perez could be a little closer to his team mate with better luck. He and Verstappen have also had the same number of race-ending technical failures so far. But Perez’s hopes of catching and passing his team mate rest on being able to decisively out-race him each weekend in the same equipment. As Verstappen already leads him by six wins to one, that seems unlikely.
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Charles Leclerc
Over the past six races Leclerc has lost a whopping 95 points to Verstappen. How has that happened, and do the reasons offer any realistic hope of a turnaround?
Undoubtedly the greatest cause of Leclerc’s grief has been Ferrari’s unreliability. Not only have power unit failures cost him a nailed-on win in Spain and a likely one in Azerbaijan, but the consequent…
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