Charles Leclerc has tried to put to bed claims from Isack Hadjar that Ferrari had the fastest car in the Singapore Grand Prix, which its driver dubbed “nonsense”.
The Frenchman made the claim that if Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen had been driving the Scuderia’s SF-26 at the Marina Bay Circuit, he would have won by a bigger margin.
This was coupled with Hadjar’s assessment that he is continuing to find the RB22 a difficult car to drive, on a weekend where the Maranello-based squad threatened to be Verstappen’s main competition.
Alas, Verstappen went on to win the race comfortably, with Leclerc second and teammate Lewis Hamilton sixth.
Speaking to media ahead of this weekend’s United States Grand Prix, Leclerc, when asked by Motorsport Week for his take on Hadjar’s opinion, dismissed the claim out of hand.
“Well, first of all, I think it’s nonsense to start saying these kinds of things,” he said. “Isack has no idea what kind of car we drive, and I have no idea what kind of car he drives.
“I think it’s such a tight field that it’s very, very difficult for us to predict. Yes, of course, we have an idea of how we will be on this track.
“But, when you are speaking about such fine margins, it relies really on optimising your package, and that has a much bigger influence than what we expect in terms of cars.”
Leclerc opined that, given the topsy-turvy nature of the season, in which Mercedes has largely dominated by fallen away recently, and with McLaren also having a brief period of superiority, predicting performance from the big four at COTA will be hard.
“I think the only outlier in the last few races is maybe Mercedes, that we expected to be further ahead than they actually were,” he continued.
“If they manage to finally unlock the performance that we had in mind for them in the last few races, then they will be further ahead than any others.
“But otherwise, it’s going to be very tight.”
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