Charles Leclerc admits the pain of missing out on the constructors’ championship with Ferrari outweighs the pride at his remarkable recovery drive in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Leclerc started 19th on the grid due to a power unit penalty and poor qualifying, leaving Ferrari with only a remote chance of overturning a 21-point deficit to McLaren with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri starting on the front row. A dramatic opening lap saw Piastri hit by Max Verstappen and Leclerc gain 11 positions to run in the top eight, going on to finish third behind teammate Carlos Sainz as Norris held on for the victory.
“I’m really happy about the race, but the disappointment is a lot bigger,” Leclerc said. “You don’t win or lose a championship in the last race — obviously, it’s over the course of the season and after every single race and McLaren has just done a better job than us. Congratulations to them.
“But it obviously hurts when you get to the last race. You know there’s an opportunity. It was a very difficult weekend, obviously, already with the penalty on Friday. It was never going to be easy. But after such a good first lap, the hopes were high. And yeah, we just came short of our dream, which was to win the constructors’. So it hurts.”
Leclerc’s brilliant first lap including a triple overtake around the outside of Turn 6 as he quickly moved himself inside the top 10, and he says he knew he had to take risks to give Ferrari any hope of overhauling McLaren.
“I knew I had to be very aggressive, so I knew that in lap 1, I had to take all the risks possible in order to gain as many places as possible, to then be in a good position for the rest of the race,” he said. “This I achieved, but then, unfortunately, we were just starting too far back to do anything better than what we’ve done today.
“I think we’ve done the maximum. It hurts, obviously, because the season was so close until the end. It was a hard hit on Friday when we knew we had the penalty. We still gave it all and we just came short of our goal, which is a shame. But at the end, we’ve tried everything.”
Sainz was closer to Norris throughout his final race for Ferrari but couldn’t quite keep in touch with the McLaren, and he admits his car didn’t quite have the performance to secure the win it required.
“Obviously, a bit of a bittersweet feeling in the end,” Sainz said. “P2, I think, was the maximum we could do today, given the pace of Lando in the McLaren. I gave it everything, especially the first stint. It looked like we could hang on to them. Then as soon as we put the hard tires, they just seemed to be that one or two tenths quicker per lap, like we’ve seen all weekend, and they just got a bit out of reach.
“Congratulations, first of all, to McLaren. They deserve this championship. They’ve been rock solid in the last two-thirds of the championship — they’ve been incredible. From our side. I think we can be proud of the effort and the championship we put together. It’s been a tough year, but definitely a year where we need to be proud of, and hopefully I’ll be back here soon.”