“Of course, it hurts,” Charles Leclerc admits defeat to teammate Carlos Sainz did not go down well with him
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Charles Leclerc
The fight for the top position in the 2021 world driver’s championship was a fiery one. The world saw Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton fight out each other in every race of the 2021 season. But there was another battle on the grid being fought in the background. It was the fight for P5 in the driver’s championship.
The fight for P5, just like P1, went down till the last lap in Abu Dhabi. The position was a three-way battle between Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc and McLaren’s Lando Norris. And, to everyone’s surprise, Carlos Sainz came out on top of the other two.
To this defeat at the hands of his debuting teammate, longtime Ferrari driver, Charles Leclerc has shared his remorse. The driver admits to being hurt after the defeat at the hands of the Spaniard. He, as quoted by the GP Fans, said, “Of course, it hurts. It hurts for every driver. As soon as you finish behind your team-mate, whether it is in the championship or in one race, it always hurts. You always want to beat your team-mate.”
Charles Leclerc lessons from the 2021 season
The driver wasn’t at his finest. Charles struggled to find consistency throughout the season and managed only a single podium compared to his teammate Carlos Sainz’s four.
The driver, looking back at the season, said, “At the same time, whether I am satisfied with last year’s season, yes I am. There are some opportunities that I lost, sometimes by not being lucky, some others because of myself just wanting too much and I am learning from it. One of the big strengths of Carlos is just being there all the time and every race he is always there.”
Charles talked about where he thought things went wrong for him. He said, “Myself, sometimes I can be a bit too optimistic and this happened last year a few times and it cost me some points. So in the end, I paid the price, I learned the lesson and it hurts but I move forward. It is the past. As I said, it hurt at the moment but when I look back across the season, I am satisfied with myself.”
Charles Leclerc is contracted with Ferrari until the end of the 2024 season. With the new Ferrari car for 2022, the driver will be hunting for more consistency and pace this year and deliver what was expected of him when the team signed him on one of the longest contracts in F1.
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