Charles Leclerc says he would have signed up for a second place in the Qatar Grand Prix ahead of the race after being surprised by Ferrari’s ability to take points off McLaren.
Max Verstappen held of Lando Norris in a close fight for the majority of Sunday’s race, with Leclerc running third after multiple safety car periods. Norris then received a penalty that dropped him out of contention and after beating Oscar Piastri to second place, Leclerc was delighted to close the gap in the constructors’ championship to 21 points.
“Honestly, I would have signed straight away if I had a paper that told me that we will finish second after a weekend like this, especially on a track like this, because our car characteristics are not fitting very well with this track,” Leclerc said. “We knew it was going to be a very difficult weekend compared to the McLaren, but at the end, we managed to take some points away from them. So the fight will be all the way to the last race in Abu Dhabi next week.
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“Yes, we did (exceed expectations) because to be honest, we knew that it would be very difficult pace-wise. We expected McLaren to be very strong in terms of race pace. We maybe did not expect Max to be that strong, but he was super strong.
“However, finishing second after such a weekend, where the track characteristics are very far off from the optimal we need for our car, is a surprise.
“We got a little bit lucky, obviously on my side. A bit unlucky with Carlos and his puncture. But as a team, it’s been a positive weekend. So yes, we exceeded our expectations because coming into the weekend, I kind of expected to lose a points compared to McLaren here. However, we recovered some, so that’s good.”
One of the reasons Leclerc believes Ferrari surprised itself was by accepting it was unlikely to be overly competitive and not worrying about the potential gap to its rivals at the start of the event.
“We knew that it wasn’t going to be our strongest weekend, but we decided to just focus on ourselves and try to do what was the best possible result for us, and I think we achieved that very well. We should be happy. Then we of course need to look at what we can do in the future to be faster on those kind of tracks, but this weekend we did work very well as a team.”