“I knew I wasn’t going to win the Championship”: Charles Leclerc shares never-before-seen comments on his title fight with Max Verstappen
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Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc
When the Formula 1 2022 season started off, the Tifosis got a pleasant surprise as Ferrari emerged as the strongest team with a brilliant pair of racers in Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, and a powerful car–the F1-75. While teams like Red Bull suffered due to reliability issues and Mercedes could not find their way around the porpoising problems, Ferrari remained at the top with a 1-2 finish in the first race of the year in Bahrain.
While Charles Leclerc did manage to get two more Grand Prix wins since his victory at the Bahrain Grand Prix, his team failed to keep up with the every-improving Red Bull team. And now, with only five races left in the current Formula 1 season, it is almost certain that Max Verstappen will win the World Championship for a second time this year as he is currently leading the WDC Standings with a whopping margin of 104 points.
And thus, Charles Leclerc, who was the initial Championship favorite of many F1 pundits at the start of the season, has to admit that he is not going to win his first title in 2022. But in the words of the Monegasque, he realised he was not going to grab the much-coveted-for trophy much before the fans noticed it.
“A gap we hadn’t seen before”: Charles Leclerc gives account of the vast points gap that led to Ferrari losing out on the Championship
When Charles Leclerc soared to the finish line at the top of the ranks at the Bahrain GP, everybody thought he was destined to get the Championship win this year. But he fell prey to too many strategical errors made by the Ferrari team and his own grave mistakes while driving under immense pressure. Speaking on how he felt the Championship win slip from his hands, he said, “After the Belgian Grand Prix I realised that I was not going to win the world championship. We came back just after the summer break and then of course you think back to the first part of the year, but I still believed in the title!”
He also stated, “Then we saw that gap in performance between us and Red Bull at Spa, a gap we had never seen in the first part of the year, so I knew it was going to be very difficult.”
Now, it is almost certain that Max Verstappen is going to get his second World Championship this season, but by no means is Charles Leclerc ready to give up the fight yet. The Ferrari racer said he is going to try the hardest to score wins in the remaining races of this year so that they can end the Championship on a high, ready for next year’s fight.
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Riddhi Mondal
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