Charles Leclerc insisted that he was driving right on the limit in Saturday’s qualifying session for the Miami Grand Prix, but the Ferrari driver was still left 0.141s adrift of Max Verstappen’s pole position time.
It was good enough to put Leclerc back on the front row of the grid again just as he had been for the Sprint race earlier in the day, and Leclerc felt there had been nothing more to squeeze out of the SF-24 this weekend.
“It felt so much on the limit,” Leclerc said in parc ferme. “Obviously, Q3 was very close until [the last two sectors]. When we started to push for the last last one or two tenths, we started to lose the tyres, overheating them quite a bit.
“Sector one was actually feeling really good but then sector two and three, we were losing too much,” he added. “So today that’s where we lost a little bit of time.
“However the race is long tomorrow,” he continued. “This morning we showed a good pace [in the Sprint] so I hope tomorrow we can put Max under a bit more pressure.”
Leclerc has a good start in the Sprint forcing Verstappen to sweep across to fend him off. But once the race resumed after an early safety car, the Red Bull had everything under control and Leclerc never got a second chance to attack.
It proved a lonely race for Leclerc, too far away from Verstappen to have a chance of challenging for the while also too far ahead of Sergio Perez to be worried about attack from behind.
One thing that was clear from the Sprint was the importance of DRS. Leclerc agreed that it was imperative that he did everything possible to stay within activation range of Verstappen in the opening laps.
“DRS is super powerful here,” he acknowledged. “If we lose it after the first lap then it’s always difficult to come back within DRS, so we must not lose it.
“But first of all there will be the start,” he pointed out. “This morning we had a good one, and tomorrow I will try to have an even better one.”
Leclerc will have his team mate Carlos Sainz starting from P3, hopefully providing a buffer to ward off early pressure from Sergio Perez who is also starting tomorrow’s race from the second row.
In the Sprint race, Sainz started behind Daniel Ricciardo and found it impossible to get past the RB in the 19-lap race despite clearly having the faster car.
Sainz said that he’s learned a lot from the Sprint and was ready to fend off Perez at the start and maybe seize any opportunities of Verstappen or Leclerc ahead of him make any mistakes.
“Honestly it was a bit of a shame about this morning,” he said. “I couldn’t get past Daniel, but I knew that the pace was there.
“I knew that with a clean quali I could be in the top three [for the GP] and we managed to do some clean laps,” he pointed out. “You always finish the lap and you feel like you could have gone so much faster having a cleaner lap.
“But it’s almost impossible to put a perfect, clean lap around here,” he said. “Every lap is a bit of an adventure. With the wind you don’t know what’s going to happen, and keeping all this in mind the laps were not too bad.”
“It’s really tricky around here with the new soft,” he continued. “There’s always one place where you slide, one place where you overheat the tyre, one place where the wind hits you differently and you start struggling.
“It’s a very tricky balance, a very tricky track to drive, and that’s why being P3 on the clean side of the road for tomorrow might be a good place to start,” he concluded.
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