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The Monegasque driver took advantage of Ferrari’s strong start to the 2022 season, winning two of the first three races. However, a resurgent Red Bull, as well as reliability and strategy issues at Maranello, along with driver blunders, ruined Ferrari’s title chances. All of this has gotten even more attention since Ferrari announced on Tuesday that team boss Mattia Binotto will be leaving at the end of the year. Reflecting on the season in which he finished second to world champion Max Verstappen, Leclerc said there was plenty of encouragement to take from Ferrari’s progress with the pace of its car. He was aware, though, that Ferrari needed to look hard at the issues it was experiencing in the middle of the season.
“Obviously, if I take a step back, considering how far we’ve come from last year, it’s an amazing step forward,” he said before team boss Binotto’s departure was announced. “However, I can’t disregard our really disappointing middle portion of the season.” “We went from leading the championship by a significant margin to trailing by a significant margin.” That was a very frustrating aspect of the season. “Overall, we simply need to take all of our mistakes from this year and strive to improve for next year.”
Leclerc believes Ferrari needs to focus on three key areas for next year if it is to make the necessary progress to compete for the championship. Reliability, strategy, and a better understanding of tyre management were among them. “It’s difficult to rank them, but consistency was an issue at one point this season, which we paid for later on with penalties and other things,” he said. “In terms of strategy, I believe we made too many mistakes at one time in the season, and in terms of tyre management, we haven’t been consistent enough at our 100%.” “Abu Dhabi was a terrific race, but we also had extremely awful races, and we don’t seem to grasp how to have proper tyre management all of the time.
“These are the three key aspects on which we are currently focusing.” “As I mentioned previously, I felt that strategy had taken a step forward in the last several races.” It’s difficult to demonstrate since we don’t have the same pace as we did at the start of the year, but the way we communicate and make choices is better. “Of course, there were a few errors, but I believe we made better decisions on race day.” The three things we’ll be focused on are tyres, strategy, and, of course, dependability.”
