by VALERIO BARRETTA
Leclerc, world championship hopes postponed to 2025
For two moments in the season Charles Leclerc he believed more in the title. The victories in Monte-Carlo and Monza gave the Monegasque great hopes, but were followed by a rude awakening: first in Montreal, where Ferrari suffered a disastrous weekend, then in Baku, where the #16 was beaten by Oscar Piastri in the battle for first position.
Now that the World Championship is headed towards a Max Verstappen-Lando Norris duel, the Ferrari driver (-86 from Super Max) is also thinking about 2025, when he will be faced with the most important challenge of his career: proving that he is equal to Lewis Hamilton , his teammate starting next winter. And according to his performance coach Jock Clear#16 is from the headline.
Clear’s words
“Charles has all it takes to win a world championshipabsolutely. I’ve been saying this since 2018. We worked with him in the Academy, we saw all the right things at all the right stages. He has the pace in qualifying and honestly I think he’s the best driver we’ve seen in qualifying. And his race management, if you look at Monza, is simply exceptional. When everything is aligned, he is capable of producing results“, this is his comment to F1 Nation.
“There were a lot of judgments like ‘We pay him a lot of money, he just needs to drive a car.’
If you think it’s just this, you’re missing something, because there are many elements to align. Charles hasn’t been in that situation yet, and the 2022 it was a good example: was it really a chance for Ferrari to win a world championship? At one point we were 40 points ahead in the championship and were able to beat Max at many circuits. So we weren’t ready as a team“, added Clear, thus sending a message to the then team principal Mattia Binotto“dismissed” following the disappointing management of that World Cup. “I think, the way the development went, Red Bull surpassed us at the end of the year. And they certainly happened things not like a team that wants to win a World Cup during that yearas Charles would say. You don’t win a championship until we’re all at that level: it’s unfair to say that Mercedes won all the championships just because they had the best car. They had the best in everything, and the same goes for Max in the last three years“.
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