Charles Leclerc will appear in fourth place for the Bahrain Grand Prix after an elegant lap in deserving, but after the session the Ferrari driver said he expected his fight with Pierre Gasly to be over. behind rather than the top three, as the race progresses. Sunday.
Ferrari entered this first race of 2021 looking for a major improvement over last year when they suffered through their worst season for four decades. And Leclerc’s display in testimony seemed to indicate that they had made progress since it came within a tenth of Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas in Q3, while Gasly was another 0.130s behind Leclerc , in the AlphaTauri.
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When asked if he was confident about his chances in the race as Ferrari may maintain a long-term competitive pace, Leclerc replied: “Yes… but it’s going to be tough. I think AlphaTauri is pretty strong in race speed with what they have shown on Friday, and they are starting in the middle [tyres] also, so it’s going to be very difficult to keep them afloat.
“I don’t think the first three are still available to us, but with a little more work, we hope we can fight them,” he said.
Leclerc showed Ferrari speed in Free Practice by finishing fifth fastest in FP3 – with our analysis placing the Scuderia in fourth place in the long distance positions. But he persuaded Ferrari not to get away with that and his fourth-place qualifying performance under the lights, along with his new team-mate Carlos Sainz in P8.
“On the quali [pace], now we know, and it surprises us. We didn’t expect to be here. But I have to say, we have to keep our feet on the ground and it’s only the first quali of the year in very weird situations, so I think we should be content as a team of what we did of step compared to the last. year.
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“If we look at last year we were fighting to get into Q2 and we didn’t, I think. So this year being P4 on the grid feels great. ”
Compared to qualifying for 2020, Ferrari lost more than half a second – 0.529s – this year after mandatory changes to car rules, but it remains to be seen how the speed of their race was affected.