Leclerc insists Ferrari moving in ‘right direction’ after Austria podium but calls for more upgrades

Charles Leclerc praised Ferrari for their “great job” in delivering effective upgrades at this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, after he and the team returned to the podium places.

Ferrari brought floor upgrades to the SF-25 at the Red Bull Ring in a bid to get their season back on track following an up-and-down sequence of races that swung between fighting for trophies to struggling for minor points.

Having split McLaren pair Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in Qualifying, thanks in part to the Australian being hampered by yellow flags, Leclerc dropped to third at the first corner and held that ‘best of the rest’ spot thereafter, with team mate Lewis Hamilton backing him up in fourth.

Reflecting on Piastri’s first-lap pass, and how his race unfolded from that point, Leclerc said: “I was not planning to try and overtake in Turn 1, actually. I don’t think it’s very much possible here to try to go around Turn 1.

“As soon as I had a good start I was side-by-side and that was basically my position, then I had to brake early, Oscar overtook me around the outside, so there wasn’t much I could have done better there.

“But to be honest, if I would have kept second place, I’m pretty sure I would have got overtaken very quickly afterwards because they [the McLarens] were just too quick today.

“We still need to work hard. The team has done a great job in bringing those upgrades and we did steps in the right direction, but we are still missing a little bit of pace.”

Asked if he feels like there is now “light at the end of the tunnel” for Ferrari, Leclerc replied: “I hope so! I mean, we are working in the right direction for sure – this weekend proves it.

“I think we have done small steps in the right direction. We need to be careful to judge too quickly our upgrades. It does everything we wanted, but we need to wait maybe two or three races in order to judge it properly and to judge our actual pace properly.

“We are going in the right direction. I hope that we can bring new parts as soon as possible and if that’s the case then I hope that this will close the gap even more so with the McLaren.”

Hamilton was also keen to “take the positives” from the weekend – pointing to both Ferraris finishing within half a minute of winner Norris after some much bigger deficits so far this year.

“I think I’m slowly making progress, which is a real positive,” the seven-time World Champion said after the race. “We’ve made progress as a team, which is really positive.

“It’s great for us to be the second-fastest team this weekend and to be so close to… we’re not a minute down [on the leaders], which is really positive.

“Obviously we can’t do what the McLarens can do at the moment, but this is really I think down to the great upgrade that we had, and I think we had a better execution as a team this weekend.”

As for whether he and Ferrari can use the weekend as a stepping stone to more success, Hamilton continued: “I can see Qualifying is getting better. My race pace is not very good.

“I’m really struggling with the balance in the race. I had massive understeer in the low-speed and massive oversteer in the high-speed – nothing I could do with my tools could fix that.

“Also we have brake problems all the time, so I was struggling with the brakes, having to manage the brakes the whole race, which is never great and that was losing time – but we’ll take the positives this weekend!”

Ferrari have moved back up to second in the Teams’ Championship following Sunday’s race in Spielberg, one point ahead of rivals Mercedes, who failed to score with Kimi Antonelli after the rookie ran into Max Verstappen’s Red Bull on the opening lap.