Even though Leclerc couldn’t catch Verstappen during the sprint race, he felt encouraged because he matched Verstappen’s speed once he had clean air to drive in.
He believes that to have a chance of beating Red Bull, they need to make Verstappen feel pressured. He thinks they can do this with their strategy.
Leclerc explained, “In the sprint race, we were a bit closer to Verstappen than usual. But Verstappen wasn’t happy with his car during the sprint race, so we have to see how much better he does with a car he likes. However, we made some improvements on our side and are confident we’ve gotten better. If we have similar speed to what we had in the sprint race, then we can apply more pressure with our strategy. We have both our cars at the front, so it’s a good chance for us.”
Leclerc believes that the gap between him and Verstappen during the sprint race, which was 3.371 seconds, doesn’t show the true difference in their cars’ performance. He struggled more when he was close to Verstappen because of the “dirty air.”
Looking back at the race, Leclerc said, “I think our cars were quite similar in speed throughout the race. Maybe in the last few laps, Verstappen was a bit faster and pulled ahead more. But most of the time, I had trouble with the dirty air. Whenever I got within about 1.8 to 1.7 seconds of Verstappen, I fell back to about 2.2 to 2.3 seconds, and then I caught up again. I mostly struggled with the dirty air. If I had the DRS (Drag Reduction System) on the first lap, I probably could have pressured Verstappen more, but I didn’t. So we need to figure out how to keep the DRS when we’re behind and use it to pull away when we’re in front.”
