F1 | Emilia Romagna GP | Charles Leclerc is fourth: "Good days are soon to come"
Leclerc's performance shows the good potential of the SF21: the Maranello team is going into the right direction after the troubled 2020
Charles Leclerc brings home another solid result in qualifying, as he scored the fourth-fastest time in quali for the second time this season. The Monegasque will share the second row of the grid with Max Verstappen, while Sir. Lewis Hamilton and Sergio Perez will be in the front row. Both Perez and Leclerc will wear soft at the start, while Hamilton and Verstappen managed to qualify on medium. The gap from Lewis was just of 0.329s, while last year Ferrari was more than a second behind the pole sitter.
The Maranello team opted for a set-up change before qualifying, which will help the Scuderia in the race.
“It was a very good qualifying, even though I feel we struggled a bit more compared to yesterday to achieve the lap times we wanted - said Leclerc after quali - we took a small compromise in terms of setup that will help us in the race tomorrow. It made it a bit more difficult in quali, so let’s wait and see. I made a small error in the chicane, maybe I could have gained another 7 or 8 hundredths there, but looking at the time sheets it wouldn’t have changed our position, so I am very happy with P4 today.
Ferrari's new SF21 hovercraft upgrade working well in Imola 👌#ImolaGP 🇮🇹 #F1 pic.twitter.com/asMWBJGbp9
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 17, 2021
"The track is amazing - said Charles, - I love it because you cannot afford to make any mistakes. There is not much tyre management involved, which is something we drivers like, because it means we can push throughout the race. It should be an exciting but difficult race. We are lacking a bit of straight line speed, so hopefully we will have a good enough pace to get away. If not, it will be a bit more difficult, but I think that our performance overall is better here than it was in Bahrain. At Sakhir it was a real surprise to be P4 on the grid, today, a bit less so".
While Sainz failed to get to Q3, maybe because of a lack of confidence with the car, Leclerc has shown once again that Ferrari is going into the right direction, after the disaster of 2020.
"There is a lot of motivation in the team, a good momentum. We need to use it and continue to work as hard as possible as a team, keep our feet on the ground and continue to push as we have been doing for the past months. Then I am sure the good days are soon to come".
