Historically it is his strong point, or at least one of his strong points, but so far in the 2024 season qualifying is proving to be almost Charles Leclerc's Achilles heel. In China, the rain began to complicate the plans of the Ferrari driver, who in the first four rounds had great difficulty putting the tires in the right window on the opening lap.
An aspect on which he had worked profitably in the only free practice session held in Shanghai, where this weekend the new revised Sprint format will be raced. However, his work was in a certain sense nullified when the track was wet by rain before the start of Q3 of the Sprint Qualifying: the Ferrari driver in fact made a mistake on the launch lap, ending up spinning and going to ” kiss” the barriers.
The front wing of his SF-24 was damaged in the impact and this forced him to return to the pits, effectively doing one flying lap less than all his rivals. A big handicap with the track conditions changing from lap to lap and which were made very treacherous by the treatments recently carried out on the asphalt which made the surface very slippery in the wet. Therefore, in the first Sprint of 2024 he will have to start from the seventh spot on the grid.
“Honestly, it was extremely complicated right from the launch lap, because it was very difficult to get the tires up to temperature. I tried to be more aggressive and I lost the car at turn 8. This ruined our qualifying a bit, because I wasn't able to work miracles, even though we couldn't have done much more in my opinion,” Leclerc said at the end of the day.
Charles Leclerc, Scuderia Ferrari
Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images
“Once again I wasn't able to give my best in qualifying and I can't be happy about this. The positive aspect, however, is that in the dry I made good progress and I'm happy, because I worked a lot on tire preparation and it seems that the first fruits are there, at least with a view to tomorrow”, he added.
If nothing else, after the Sprint tomorrow there will be qualifying for the long race on Sunday, so the Monegasque will have an opportunity to try to redeem himself and to evaluate the progress he believes he has made in preparing the dry tyre.
“That's what I hope to be able to do. I already wanted to show something today, but then with the rain in Q3 I wasn't able to. Tomorrow we'll try to give our best in the Sprint and then we'll see what happens in qualifying”, he concluded.
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