Charles Leclerc has denied that he needs to alter his driving style after crashing out of qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix.
Leclerc had a high-speed spin at Turn 7 in the final moments of Q3 and made contact with the barrier, bringing the session to a premature end.
It marked the Monegasque driver’s second shunt of the race weekend, as he alsp spun into the wall at the same corner on Friday.
Despite displaying strong one-lap pace during his F1 career so far, some have labelled the Ferrari driver as error-prone.
However, he doesn’t feel he needs to change anything relating to his style.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I obviously need to, in those weekends especially, just manage it differently in Q3.
“In the end, it’s like this. I put myself also in a difficult situation because I wanted a very aggressive setup for qualifying, knowing that this was the setup I would need to extract the most out of the car.
“I probably did a step too far, and this is something I’ll look at after the weekend.
“I’m very hard with myself. But I also know what are my strong points and what it gives me on the other side, taking this much risk.
“But it’s just very disappointing. Then looking forward to tomorrow, I’m pretty sure I’ll recover and reset. On that, I’m not worried.”
Leclerc has endured a challenging season to date, retiring from two of the four races staged so far.
Ferrari has also been unable to challenge at the front, with Red Bull taking a clean sweep of race victories in 2023.
Leclerc will start Sunday’s race from seventh, and conceded that there is no chance that he will be able to progress towards the head of the field.
“Unfortunately, absolutely not,” he said when asked if he could challenge for the win.
“The Red Bull is way too strong in terms of degradation, tyre degradation.
“So I think they will be in a league of their own. Then if we can finish behind them, it will be already a great achievement, because the Aston [Martin] seems very strong too.”
Discussion about this post