Charles Leclerc wants Max Verstappen to keep up his aggressive moves against Lando Norris as it will help his championship chances.
Verstappen was penalised twice in yesterday’s race for his strong-arm moves on the McLaren driver. Leclerc passed the pair of them during the second, when Verstappen dived down the inside of Norris at turn seven, failed to make the apex and took both off the track.
Although Norris passed Leclerc before the end of the race, the Ferrari driver finished ahead of Verstappen, and took points off the championship leader for the fourth time in the last five races. Leclerc is 71 points off the championship lead with 120 available.
“I welcome Max being as aggressive to Lando as possible because it helps me, at least it gives me chances to be closer to Lando in the drivers’ championship because it’s still a fight,” he said. “If anything, it’s more a fight, Lando and myself than with Max, who has quite an advantage in points.”
Leclerc said he doesn’t “think about the drivers’ championship, realistically.”
“I think first the approach is not to start thinking about the drivers’ championship,” he explained. “That doesn’t help me achieve anything more. It’s by focusing race-by-race.
“And more than that, I just feel like it’s not in my control whether I win the drivers’ championship. Or there’s part of it that is in my control, and if I win all races, that puts most of the chances on my side. But even if I do that, I’ve got to have Max that has very poor weekends and I don’t rely on that, so I’ll just try and do the best possible end of the season, and then we’ll do the maths at the end of the season.”
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He suspects Norris could have passed Carlos Sainz Jnr to win the race had he not lost so much time fighting Verstappen early on.
“I had no chance to stay in front of Lando. Lando was flying, and I think as a team, we’ve been pretty lucky that whatever happened with Max and Lando at the beginning of the race, that slowed him down massively. His second stint was very, very impressive.
“So that was a good thing for us, and that probably helped us. On my side, there was no way that I could stay in front.”
Leclerc lost second place when he lost control of his car at the final corner and nearly crashed. “I knew that it would be very difficult,” he said. “I knew that I had to have an incredible exit out of the last corner, so I tried to put everything to have a really good exit, went over the limit, lost the car and lost the position. But I felt it was a question of laps or corners before I lost that position.”
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2024 Mexican Grand Prix
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