No “trend” to poor Ferrari performances since Monaco win

Charles Leclerc sees no connection between Ferrari’s poorer performances in the two races since he won the Monaco Grand Prix.

The team suffered a very poor weekend in Canada where neither driver reached Q3 or finished the race. Leclerc finished fifth in Spain ahead of Carlos Sainz Jnr in the other Ferrari, but the team was not on the pace of Red Bull, McLaren or Mercedes.

However Leclerc believes different factors lay behind their sub-par results in those two races. “For Montreal, I think we’ve identified quite well what was going wrong and it was more down to the tyres,” he said. “In Barcelona, I think it was just raw pace and we were just slower than what we expected.”

Ferrari also introduced an upgrade package at the Spanish Grand Prix which Leclerc says they haven’t got the most out of yet.

“We’ll keep on working on ourselves, try to optimise also the new package that we have on the car.” he said. “That obviously was the first race [for it] in Barcelona and we still have some work to try and find something and understand a bit more these new parts that we are using now.

“However, I don’t think that the issues were the same in Montreal and Barcelona, so I don’t think it’s a trend.”

He expects the Red Bull Ring will suit their car better this weekend. “We have been struggling mostly with long, slow-speed corners, which here there are a little bit less [of]. So that’s a good sign for us.

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“But we’re also working on that in order to have a better car in those corners, which I think we’ve seen some good steps forward in the last few races, however we were struggling then in other corners. So we’ve just got to put everything together, but we are working on it and I’m confident it will be fine this weekend.”

The bulk of Ferrari’s deficit to their rivals last weekend came in two similar corners at the Circuit de Catalunya, said Leclerc.

“In qualifying there are two corners where we have lost everything in Barcelona, and that was five and ten, and ten being probably the corner that fits the characteristics that I was saying earlier, slow and long corners, slow-speed and long corners. So these are the kind of corners that we really need to work on.”

However he said it may take until the next race for the team to fully exploit its upgrade from last week. “Here we have quite a lot of high speed as well so it will be a good test to see where…