Charles Leclerc has admitted it was a “good surprise” to secure second on the grid for the Austrian Grand Prix, having initially believed a front-row start was out of reach.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Leclerc had looked set for a second- or third-row start based on his performances in second and third practice, with Dino Beganovic having taken his car for the opening session of the weekend.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Even after the opening two parts of qualifying at the Red Bull Ring, the front row still looked an unlikely outcome.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
However, in Q3, the SF-26 came alive for both Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, who briefly provisionally locked out the front row with their final laps.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Ultimately, George Russell secured pole by two-tenths of a second, dropping the Scuderia duo back one position each.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, after back-to-back frustrating weekends in Monaco and Barcelona, Leclerc was extremely pleased to have delivered such a strong qualifying performance.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I’m relatively happy about today,” said Leclerc.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“Of course, the last few weekends have been quite tough, so I just wanted to have a clean weekend and, most of all, a clean qualifying to start well for tomorrow. So, yeah, to start second is a good place to start from.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“The team have been pushing massively to bring upgrades in Barcelona and again this weekend, and that has paid off.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“If I’m completely honest, I didn’t think we’d be starting on the front row until qualifying, really, so it’s a good surprise that we are so fast.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charles Leclerc has admitted it was a “good surprise” to secure second on the grid for the Austrian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":764345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,827,830,828,831,829,826,813,823,825,806,805,824,803,804,822,85],"class_list":["post-764344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motorsport","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/764345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}