24 July 2023 , 16:33
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Charles Leclerc feels as though his current Ferrari situation means "nobody really notices" when he does a good job behind the wheel.
Despite coming into the 2023 season with ambitions of a title fight, it has been yet another underwhelming year so far. The Italians are fourth in the constructors' standings and, given McLaren's recent improvements, may have only the fifth quickest car right now.
Last weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix yielded just 10 points for the team as they lost more ground to Mercedes. And Leclerc's individual haul was six, after he lost a place in the classification to George Russell due to a penalty.
"The pit stop was quite slow and we had a five seconds penalty for speeding in the pit lane," said the Monegasque as he reflected upon another "difficult" weekend for his team. But his real annoyance lies with how the poor performance of his car masks the work he is doing.
Leclerc said: "Honestly, it's frustrating overall because I felt that with the pace we have today, even as a driver, when you are feeling like you are doing a good job with a car you have, nobody really notices it. And whenever you are doing a bad job, everybody notices it. So it is difficult but, at the end, it's part of the game.
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"I feel like the [Hungary] result is much worse than what it felt like. The first stint felt pretty good, then with the slow stop it really put us on the back foot being behind Lance [Stroll]. I had to push a lot, then we were with Carlos [Sainz] and we lost a bit of time there.
"Then in the third stint I pushed again and there again the car felt quite okay. So I feel like the result looks worse than what it actually is but it's clear that, compared to Lando [Norris] especially, we are still behind."
To make matters worse, Leclerc suffered from other issues in the cockpit during the race. Not only did he not have any access to his water tube in the sweltering heat on track, but his radio was not working properly, which led to him shouting that his team's strategy "doesn't make sense" as he tried to decipher what his race engineer was saying.
He added: "I had no water. Just before the start I realised that the tube was too short so I couldn't reach the water. So it was really frustrating. And we also have a lot of problems with the radio. One out of four words is not understood by an engineer because there's problems with our radio [for] three or four races. We need to fix that.
"Obviously, my tone of voice is quite high because I need to make myself heard. But I just wanted to make sure that they understand me wrong and that I wanted to go aggressive early and not aggressive late. So it was just about clarifying because of our radio issues."