Charles Leclerc says a slight change to his driving style was enough to go from a Q1 elimination in a damp qualifying session in Spain last month to pole position today.
The Ferrari driver qualified second on the grid for the Belgian Grand Prix but will start from pole position as Max Verstappen will have a five-place grid penalty due to a gearbox change.The qualifying session took place in damp, drying conditions in which Leclerc had poor results earlier in the season. He failed to make the cut for Q2 in the Spanish Grand Prix as he was mystified by his car’s handling on the drying track.
Although he qualified over eight tenths of a second slower than Verstappen, Leclerc said he was “happier” with their result in Belgium after the work he had done to address his difficulties in mixed conditions.
“I put quite a lot of work in those conditions, half-wet to half-dry,” he explained. “I knew it was one of those conditions where I was still struggling with the car.
“I didn’t have the right feeling in Barcelona, I cannot remember the other races we had but we had two or three races in a row where we had those conditions, and today I felt much better in the car. So this was positive.”
Leclerc was the first driver to complete his final lap in Q3, meaning those behind him benefited from slightly drier conditions. He said that accounted for part of his gap to Verstappen.
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“I’m still very far from from Max, in Q3 especially. But all in all, I think in Q3 we could have done things a bit slightly better.
Leclerc said he’d been “making too many mistakes” in damp conditions before and finding it “difficult to build from a solid base – so I changed a little bit the approach and it seems to be better.”
“It’s very difficult to give details because it’s very slight changes in terms of driving style,” he added. “But that makes a big difference at the end.
“I have a very aggressive driving style, whether it’s in full wet or full dry, which pays off in those two conditions. But whenever I’m in between with slick tyres, then it doesn’t really pay off. I tried different directions also with tools, so the way the car is set up and the way I can change it from one corner to the other, and this gave me much more confidence straight away and the lap time came better.”
The qualifying session was especially challenging because of the variation in grip levels at different points on the track, Verstappen added.
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“It was very difficult, especially [turn] eight-nine [Bruxelles] was horrible. You would get into the corner and you never knew how much grip you will have. You just had to trust the car to grip again because in between eight and nine there was really low grip and then in the middle of nine you will get the grip again and you just had to trust the process.
“You can never really go over the limit in those conditions so you just need to go step by step and and get as close as possible in the last lap of Q3.”
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Esploratore (@esploratore1)
28th July 2023, 23:21
Interesting that leclerc focused on driving in this kind of conditions to improve, and indeed I saw him more competitive than usual in the wet.
Avto
29th July 2023, 10:10
Regardless of his recent results and general frustration with the car, I do believe that given a chance he is still the biggest challenger to Max together with Lando.