Charles Leclerc praised McLaren’s progress after Lando Norris claimed pole for the sprint race, noting the team have clearly closed the gap.
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The Ferrari driver topped first practice and was fastest in Q2, but he said the car felt less competitive on the soft tyres used in the final qualifying phase compared with the medium tyres they ran earlier.
Leclerc also believes McLaren are now showing their true form.
“Our upgrades are fine, it’s just that everybody brought upgrades,” Leclerc said after qualifying fourth, behind the two McLarens and Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes.
“We kind of expected that Mercedes would still be strong. McLaren have taken a very big step forward, but I felt they didn’t really optimise their early races this season — they were always there, but they didn’t put everything together.”
“On our side, today in particular, we struggled with tyres. The medium tyre was working very well, but on the soft it wasn’t a nice feeling, so we need to look into that.”
Despite the qualifying disappointment, Leclerc is confident Ferrari can improve across the weekend. “We know that in the race we are stronger,” he said. “In qualifying there’s still some work to be done.”
“For the grand prix tomorrow we can try to fine-tune and find a bit more performance,” he added. “I hope in the race we can get back to the front. We’ve got the pace to do that — now it’s a question of whether we can overtake.”
His team mate Lewis Hamilton, who qualified seventh, said he expected more from Ferrari’s upgrade package.
“I thought we’d be stronger than we were today,” Hamilton said. “We’ll have to do some work overnight to figure out why we’re not quicker. I came here hopeful, thinking we’d be much higher, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
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