Charles Leclerc believes the changes to the Albert Park for this year’s Australian Grand Prix will suit rivals Red Bull.
The championship leader lost out to Max Verstappen in the last race at Jeddah after the Red Bull driver used his straight-line speed advantage to pass him.Although average speeds around Albert Park are much lower than Jeddah, several corners have been widened for F1’s first race in Australia since 2019. Two turns have also been removed, creating a considerably quicker second sector.
The changes were made to create more overtaking opportunities at a track where passing has often been difficult. Leclerc suspects they will make a difference, but expects Red Bull will benefit from the alterations.
“Probably for our car I would have preferred to stay with the old layout, but that’s only from a performance point of view,” he said. “But I think for overtaking it will definitely be better. How much better is still yet to see.
“But it looks interesting. Turn six, seven will be quite challenging for us now. Nine, 10 we will arrive at much higher speed. So it should be it should be an exciting track.”
Although he expects Red Bull will be competitive this weekend, Leclerc believes Ferrari will be able to race them.
“Red Bull seems to be very strong in the straight lines and there are quite a lot of straight-line speed now or straight lines in general now. So we might struggle a bit more.
“But it’s like this. I’m still pretty sure that if we do the perfect weekend, this is still an opportunity for us to do very well. So we’ll just focus on our own job and hopefully we’ll have a great weekend.”
The Ferrari drivers set the quickest lap times in the first practice session, followed by the Red Bull pair.
McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo assisted the designers in reconfiguring the circuit. “Back in 2019 a few of us drivers were involved in discussions about how we can make Albert Park a little more racer-friendly for Sunday and open up some of the apexes,” he explained.
“It’s always been a fun track from a driver’s point of view, it was always enjoyable, but it was a track which didn’t provide the most amount of overtaking. It was trying to really encourage that and see if we could still keep some of the character from the circuit but just help out with Sunday.”
Ricciardo is confident the track will produce better racing this year. “I’m confident it’s better, it’s just now probably what scale.
“But I think we’ll have a good race. Now with these new cars as well, we can follow and run a lot closer, I think we will be in store for a good one.”
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