Leclerc<\/a> admits that the result surprised himself and Ferrari, with the Scuderia having struggled last time out in Austria as neither Hamilton or Leclerc challenged for a rostrum finish.<\/p>\n“We are extremely surprised I think with Lewis taking the pole today, but in general we were expecting just a much bigger gap to the cars in front,” said Leclerc.<\/p>\n
“It’s a good step forward. I think as a team we are very, very surprised to be that competitive on a track like this.”<\/p>\n
Hamilton had set the pace throughout Friday, going quickest in the sole, one-hour practice session and all three segments of Sprint Qualifying.<\/p>\n
Leclerc had also looked strong early in proceedings, finishing P2 and P3 across the opening two sessions, before dropping to P4 and nearly four tenths adrift of Hamilton in the final order.<\/p>\n
“It’s been quite a bit that I realise I didn’t have the ease that I had with last year’s car and even when I push, whenever I put things together, we speak about hundredths and Lewis is more often at 100% of the potential of the car, which I’m not,” said Leclerc.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got to work on everything really, but I think most importantly, it’s just the feeling with this car.<\/p>\n
“When you don’t get quite the feeling then it’s difficult to extract the lap time and to have the confidence of every Saturday going into Qualifying, in this case it’s a Friday, and get to the limit of the car.<\/p>\n
“I’m struggling just to be consistent, to be at my 100%. SQ1 and SQ2 I was close to it, I was quite confident for SQ3, but I lost the car. I just don’t feel the car as well as I should.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charles Leclerc believes he has “got to work on everything” as he was left in fourth while Ferrari…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":777457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-777456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777456","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=777456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/777457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}