Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc will start tomorrow’s Italian Grand Prix from P5 at Monza and alongside him there will be his Maranello teammate Carlos Sainz, according to the results in today’s Sprint Race.
Compared to the results on Friday, this means a two-place gain for Charles Leclerc, thanks to the crash Pierre Gasly on Lap 1 of today’s event and the penalty received by Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas, who will have to start from the pit lane after changing his power unit.
And objectively Charles Leclerc admitted that either he or Carlos Sainz can hope to improve on this result in normal conditions in the Italian Grand Prix on Sunday:
“We had a good sprint qualifying and maximized our potential, finishing 6th and 7th. Due to Valtteri’s penalty, we will each move up a place and lock out the third row of the grid, which is the best we could have wished for. The realistic goal is to keep our positions, because to fight for more than that is going to be very, very difficult,” he admitted to the media after the end of Saturday’s 18-lap race. We’ll focus to maximise the car and, hopefully, we get a good result. Tyre management will be a key factor tomorrow, especially on the first few laps where you have to push. It should be a bit more interesting, hopefully, with the tyre degradation, because tyre degradation is quite high here. We have some useful data from today and will work on finding the best front-wing setup based on that. I expect the race to be a tough one, because our competitors ahead have had a strong pace all weekend. Our job will be to score as many points as possible, and if we have a perfect race, we can put some pressure on the four cars in front.” – he explained, at the end of Sprint Qualifying
At the same time, Charles Leclerc did not want to go into details regarding his sudden illness but confirmed that the adrenalin involved in a race tended to work wonders: “It depends on what you have, sometimes it’s difficult to forget,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to “go into details” about the illness and that he didn’t “think you want to know”.
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