Leclerc issues DAMNING Ferrari verdict despite Spa optimism

Charles Leclerc has admitted that Ferrari are 'very far' from their expectations for the current season, after admitting that the team still need to understand exactly what is going wrong.

For the third time this season, Leclerc claimed a podium finish at the Belgian Grand Prix, as he adds Spa to the list of races he can look back on with pride in 2023 – alongside Baku and Spielberg.

Yet heading into the summer break, the wider picture is far more bleak for both Leclerc and Ferrari.

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The 25-year-old sits P5 in the driver standings on 99 points, while the Maranello-based team find themselves in fourth, behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin in the constructors' championship.

After both driver and team recorded P2 results in their respective championships in 2022, some had hoped that they might be able to go one step further this season.

A goal that Leclerc himself shared, but heading into the season break, the Monegasque driver knows just how far off the pace they really are.

Ferrari far from expectations

"It didn't go well," he said when asked for his summary of the first half of the season. "Before the first race, the target was to do a step better, compared to last year, which was to win the world championship.

"If we look at the first half of the year, we are very far from where we put our expectations before the season. So, on the other hand, as soon as we understood that, we reset it and there was an incredible reaction from the team.

"They brought upgrades, sometimes a month and a half earlier, and this requires a lot of effort from everybody at Maranello. And this, we saw that, it helped us have great results."

We need to understand our own performance

Yet for Leclerc, the worry is that Ferrari may not truly understand why they are performing at their current level, admitting that more work needs to be done to get to the bottom of things.

He said: "I think we still need to try to understand – because if I do a step back in the last two races, I think we expected to be much more competitive in Budapest than on a track like here and at the end, it’s the opposite.

"So, these are things that we need to look at because maybe we haven’t optimised the package in races like Budapest and maybe we’ve done something that was surprisingly good on a track like here."

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