Charles Leclerc

Charles Leclerc's huge early championship lead is slightly misleading, but Max Verstappen and Red Bull need a quick solution to their car issues to stop a ...

"But there are many other little improvements we can make on weight and other things we can optimise and we just need to chip away the small gains while understanding the car. "And then to keep up with Red Bull in terms of development is going to be difficult, but yeah, it's the same team that did this car, that will work on the development for this year's car, so I am confident. On average, Mercedes has been 0.85 seconds off pole position at the first three rounds of the season, and the gap to pole as a percentage has been slowly creeping up at each round. That's perhaps no surprise given the time and resources Ferrari was able to pour in to the development of this year's car over the last two years while Red Bull and Mercedes were fighting for championships. But years of championships titles in the junior series prior to F1 means he is not entirely unprepared, and he has already adapted his approach to the championship campaign. "Obviously they started this project a lot earlier than we did, so to a degree we are playing catch-up," he said. "Of course I did a good job all weekend, but it was not possible without the car and this weekend, especially on race pace, we were extremely strong. The tricky balance of the car also seemed to impact tyre performance, as Red Bull tore open the surface of their front left tyres while Ferrari managed to avoid a similar issue with Leclerc. But Verstappen's misfortune should not take anything away from the performance of Ferrari and Leclerc this year. On the basis of pure performance, there has been very little to choose between Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen this season. I think it might be a fuel issue, but we need to get the car back, we need to be able to look at what's exactly happened." Not really having the pace, I was just managing my tyres to bring it to the end.