01/04/2023
NEWS STORY
While blaming poor communications for his poor run, Charles Leclerc ultimately blames himself for a disappointing qualifying which leaves him seventh on the grid.
What a difference a year makes. This time twelve months ago, Charles Leclerc claimed pole position in Melbourne and went on to win the race, tomorrow he will start from fourth row of the grid.
"Q1 and Q2 I clearly wasn't on it," he admitted, "I wasn't driving well, I wasn't putting everything together so that was my fault.
"In Q3 I managed to feel a bit better in the car," he continued, "confident I could put everything together. On the first run, it's a bit my fault also as when you arrive into Q3 you need to put everything together in whatever laps you do.
"Unfortunately, I don't know what happened in the second run of Q3, whether it was a miscommunication with Carlos, but I found myself behind him for the whole of the first sector, which wasn't great."
Fearing rain in the final "three or four minutes", Ferrari had sent the youngster out early, and as result he was out of sync with much of the field, including his teammate.
"We'll speak at the debrief about that to try and improve those situations," said the Monegasque. "We could have optimised it by having better communication, but I also didn't do a great job today.
"I'm not particularly happy with the way I drove," he admitted. "To be honest I feel like we are quite competitive, but I just didn't put everything together. From Jeddah to here honestly the feeling is better. I wont panic, I just needed to drive better today, and I think the car wasn't that bad, the feeling was actually quite good.
"Let's see tomorrow whether we improved it. I think part of the changes we've done this weekend was to make the race pace better.
"It might have hurt a little bit the predictability in the race, but hopefully we will see some positive signs. I think it's a big question mark tomorrow, but the feeling on the few laps I've done was quite positive."
"We had a bit of a bad preparation lap in that lap with the tyre temperatures," added teammate Carlos Sainz. "We let by two or three cars we thought were on a push lap, or they told me they were, so I had to slow down a lot to let them by.
"They slowed me down because they were not on push laps," he continued. "I lost two, three-tenths in sector one for tyre prep, and then I had to risk a lot in sector two and three and picked up the pace.
"I did actually a very good lap after that. I think that would have put me in the top three, which would have been good progress and good lap time found from Jeddah.
"I'm reasonably comfortable," he added. "I think we've done some good progress with my feeling with the car. We've changed quite a lot, the set-up up from yesterday, trying to improve it mainly for the race. I am a lot happier with the car. I've done some strong laps, I've been pushing quite hard.
"Also, the changes that we have done should go in the right direction for tomorrow."
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