Charles Leclerc has insisted Ferrari hasn’t given up on the Formula 1 title in 2025, despite admitting the team’s competitiveness “is not good enough” to rival McLaren.
Leclerc came into the campaign expressing that Ferrari’s ambition was to build on a strong end to the previous season to claim both championships this time around.
But while the Italian marque has shown promise on selective occasions, the squad’s SF-25 machine hasn’t been a consistent match to McLaren’s pacesetting MCL39.
Alongside struggling to maximise the car’s potential, Ferrari has also rued operational mishaps in both the opening rounds coming at a cost to the team’s points total.
That included separate technical violations causing both drivers to be excluded in China, which has culminated in Ferrari trailing a sizeable 61 points behind McLaren.
However, Leclerc has vowed that Ferrari’s target remains unchanged, highlighting that Red Bull’s advantage 12 months ago was greater than the gap McLaren boasts.
“If we go back to last year, if we look at the first few races, I think the situation in terms of performance was quite a bit worse than where we are now,” Leclerc told media including Motorsport Week.
“We kind of expected Red Bull to dominate the whole season and obviously by taking the points that were available at the beginning of the season with the performance that we had, we ended the season actually fighting for the championship which was way above our expectations starting the year.”
Ferrari challenge dependent on upgrades
Leclerc, though, has suggested that Ferrari’s diminishing championship prospects will depend on the team’s upcoming developments reducing the deficit to McLaren.
“It’s always tricky to extract the maximum. I don’t think it’s harder this season – it’s just the performance compared to McLaren is just not good enough,” he assessed.
“It’s not about extracting the performance – it’s just that there isn’t enough of it for now.
“But step by step, I’m sure and confident we can close that gap, starting from this weekend hopefully.”
Leclerc calls on Ferrari to avoid more setbacks
Nevertheless, Leclerc emphasised that it is imperative that Ferrari maximises its results until upgrades arrive and avoids setbacks like the one it endured in Shanghai.
“Whenever you do mistakes you learn from them, and especially when they are costing that much,” he added.
“Obviously everybody is playing with the limit and trying to be as close as possible to it but to have both cars [disqualified] was a big pain and we didn’t need that.
“At the end of the day It’s been a very difficult part first part of the season.
“The first two races were difficult, the pace was not exactly where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, hurts the team a lot.
“But I’m confident that we learn from it and obviously whenever these kind of events happen we try and understand and analyse where did that go wrong and change a little bit the process of that. It was a multitude of things adding up which makes that the margin we took was not big enough.”
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