Charles Leclerc’s defeat in the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix spurred him to raise his game on race day, Ferrari’s performance engineer Jock Clear believes.
His team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr won the race from pole position, inflicting the only defeat Red Bull suffered all season. Clear said losing that race had a profound effect on Leclerc.
“I think he’s responded well to [having] a very strong team mate,” Clear told the official F1 channel. “We’ve long talked about the qualities of Carlos, and the fact is Carlos probably doesn’t quite have that edge of pace that Charles can show in qualifying.
“But you look at Singapore last year and that really hit home to Charles, that was a race that Charles you would have said would have gone there as a favourite to win. Singapore, he often goes there with a lot of confidence, and of course for Carlos to nick that one under his nose really hurt.”
Although Sainz beat Leclerc to pole position on that occasion, Clear said the race showed Leclerc he needs to improve his performance over a grand prix distance.
“That sort of thing has made him focus on ‘okay, I really need to get the job done on Sunday’. That’s not to say he never thought that, but it does mean you change your focus slightly.
“If you take it away from ‘okay, we just need to get the best qualifying car we can and get a qualifying lap and then it’ll all happen on a Sunday’. So I think you’re just seeing a better representation of Charles and all of us as a race driver, as a race car, as a race team.”
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Despite having taken pole position on 26 occasions, Leclerc has won far fewer races, with seven grand prix victories to his name. However Clear denied his driver is much weaker over a race distance than he is in qualifying.
“We all know what he’s capable of, we’ve seen that over a few years now,” he said. “His reputation in qualifying has certainly been cemented over those years, in so much as people tended to say to me two years ago, three years ago ‘yeah, but he’s nowhere near as good in the race as he is in qualifying’. And you think, well, that’s not really fair, it’s just that he’s very, very good at qualifying.”
Leclerc has won twice this year, including at Monza, where he started fourth. This is the lowest position he has ever won a race from and only the second time he has taken victory without…
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