by VALERIO BARRETTA
Monza, Leclerc starts fourth
Perhaps he would have expected something more from his Monza, but fourth place on the grid could put Charles Leclerc in a position to play for something important tomorrow. The Monegasque hopes so, even talking about victory despite a McLaren that appeared superior, the Ferrari fans who have been waiting for a success in Monza for five years dream of it.
Leclerc’s words
For the winner of the 2019 edition, the Grand Prix will be open and will have tyre management as its key. If Ferrari can do a good job in this respect and stay in McLaren’s DRS, nothing would be out of the question for Leclerc: “I want to look forward. Behind, there are a lot of very fast drivers and I would have expected to find them ahead of us today. Hamilton had a very good race pace in FP2, but he was a bit too slow at the beginning, which he won’t be able to afford tomorrow.“, this is the first comment from the Ferrari driver. “We will all have a very similar pace and I hope to win tomorrow. We will need a good start and then try to stay in the McLaren DRS, which we expect to be very strong. Then it will be a race of tire managementthat’s what will make the difference in the race. Red Bull will also be strong: however I don’t expect them to be much stronger than us on Sunday“.
The weak point of the Monegasque was the first sector, where he lost those two tenths that precluded him from fighting for pole position. Carlos Sainz, on the contrary, collected partial records in T1 and then went on to lose in the last part: “He was definitely a bit stronger in Turn 1-2. That’s something we’ll look at again, and we’ve already looked at it. We haven’t made a step forward with my setup on that side. Up until Turn 5 we had exactly the same problems from FP1. In FP2 it was just understeer, we couldn’t turn the car. In FP3, for some reason, the problem was gone, then in qualifying it came back. That’s frustrating, because I think we lost more than two and a half tenths in four corners at the beginning of the lapthen going back up is very difficult. Now we have to concentrate on the pace, tomorrow I don’t expect to have the same problems“.
The Spaniard stressed how Ferrari’s updates have helped eliminate the problem of rebound. Leclerc, however, believes that this was due to the circuit: “Monza is a track where we don’t normally have this kind of problem, even last year it was a pretty good race for us in this respect. We made a step forward and from the numbers it seems that everything is going much better. I don’t think, however, that we would have suffered from rebounds on this track even with the old package. Everything we expected from this surface is there, it’s a good sign for the future“.
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