“I Just Don’t Understand the Drivers”: Charles Leclerc Calls Out F1 Colleagues Over Ill-Famed Attitude

The 2022 season started on a high note for Charles Leclerc as he won two out of the three opening races this year. However, after that, he had to wait for 8 rounds to stand on the top step of the podium once again. Driver errors, faulty strategies, and the reliability issues of the F1-75 held him back and put him on the back foot in his quest for the world title.

The Monegasque has suffered two major blows for which he has no one to blame but himself. At the Imola GP, he lost 7 valuable points as he touched the wall in his pursuit of overtaking the Red Bull of Sergio Perez. Furthermore, at the French GP, he crashed out at turn 11 while leading the race and that cost him an additional 25 points.

Triumph in F1 requires the whole team to be in sync and success is not only on the shoulders of the driver. Despite this, Leclerc has stepped up and owned up to his mistakes, rather than playing the blame game. In an interview with BBC Sport, he opined on the aspect of honesty.

He said, “I really don’t see the point of hiding it, and sometimes it is so obvious to everybody that the mistake comes from driver, I just don’t understand the drivers that are trying to have excuses with the wind or whatsoever.”

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“I mean, sometimes it can happen. One out of 200 crashes, you’ll get something very strange happen. But I just don’t like to lose time with finding excuses, because that’s exactly when you start to lose time, and you just don’t go forward.”

How Charles Leclerc deals with his own mistakes?

At Le Castellet, the Ferrari ace clinched the pole position for the Grand Prix and it looked like he would close the gap on his rival, Max Verstappen. Nevertheless, the story unfolded in an opposite manner as the Red Bull driver extended his advantage; with car number 16 scoring no point that day. Following the crash, Leclerc failed to contain his frustration and screamed over his team radio.

The 24-year-old shared how he deals with his mistakes by saying, “I’m always harsher whenever it’s me who does the mistake, and obviously France was one of those which which hurt quite a bit. Imola also a little bit, even though there weren’t many points involved because I could go back on track.”

“But whenever I go through this tough time, I go through the same process as I was saying before, trying to analyse what was wrong. And it’s mostly mentally.”

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With 9 races to go in the champion, he is 80 points behind Verstappen, when the gap without the mistakes could have been smaller. Do you think the Monte-Carlo-born racing driver will bounce back in the second half of the season?