Charles Leclerc confident in Ferrari recovery despite “big pain” from China DQs

Charles Leclerc is refusing to write off Ferrari’s chances this season despite their double disqualification at the F1 Chinese Grand Prix.

Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were excluded from the final race results in Shanghai due to two different technical infringements.

Leclerc was disqualified after his car was deemed underweight following post-race scrutineering checks.

Due to excessive plank wear, Hamilton’s Ferrari was also not classified in the final race results.

It ruined a reasonably positive weekend for Ferrari as Hamilton dominated the sprint race, having taken pole position.

Speaking at the FIA press conference in Japan on Thursday, Leclerc revealed that a “multitude” of factors contributed to the DQs.

“Confident because whenever you do mistakes you learn from them, especially when they are costing that much,” Leclerc explained. “Obviously, to have both cars underneath it was a big pain and we didn’t need that. At the end of the day, it’s been a difficult first part of the season.

“The first two races were difficult. The pace wasn’t exactly where we expected it to be. To lose even more points than we did with that hurts the team a lot. I am confident we learned from it and whenever this kind of event happens we try and understand, analyse where that did go wrong and change a little bit the process of that.

“It was a multitude of things adding up which meant that the margin we had taken wasn’t big enough.”

Leclerc confident in Ferrari recovery

Ferrari are level on points with Williams - 17 points each - after the first two rounds.

While Ferrari's results have been lacking, Leclerc is still confident they can have a successful campaign if they make small improvements in the coming rounds - like they did last year.

“Not yet. I think if we go back to last year if we look at the first few races I think the situation in terms of performance was quite a bit worse than where we are now,” Leclerc added. “We kind of expected Red Bull to dominate the whole season and obviously by taking the points that were available at the beginning of the season with the performance that we had we ended up the season fighting for the championship which was way above our expectations starting the year.

“There’s definitely not this feeling within the team at the moment. However, there’s definitely the feeling we haven’t maximised what we could have for these first two races.

“This is frustrating, that doesn’t mean we cannot recover. We are aware this season is still very, very long. Small steps after small steps then we can still have an amazing season.”