Charles Leclerc has admitted Ferrari won’t have the raw pace with its 2024 Formula 1 car to overcome McLaren and Red Bull to take the Constructors’ Championship.
Ferrari was unable to capitalise on having a competitive package in Singapore as Leclerc recovered to fifth place, while team-mate Carlos Sainz came home seventh.
The Italian outfit starting down the order with both cars due to a setback in qualifying meant it was unable to challenge McLaren, which dominated with Lando Norris.
Norris’ win and Oscar Piastri’s third place has seen McLaren increase its gap over Red Bull in the Constructors’ Championship to 41 points with six rounds remaining.
Meanwhile, Ferrari had emerged as an outside title contender with Leclerc’s win in Monza and second place in Baku, but the marque is now 75 points below McLaren.
With Norris inflicting a 20-second winning margin in Singapore, Leclerc has conceded Ferrari will be reliant on rivals’ errors and consistent results to close that deficit.
“I think if we keep being consistent and not having too many missed opportunities, we will do the count at the end and hopefully we’ll be enough to get the Constructors’ [title],” he said.
“But on pure pace, I don’t think we are yet at the level to fight for the Constructors.
“I don’t see ourselves too much in the fight, but if they make mistakes then we might end up in the fight like we are now.”
Leclerc remains cautious over whether Ferrari has solved the high-speed bouncing that blighted its competitiveness earlier this term, despite its recent promising run.
“As much as the last two races were good, I think we’ve always been saying we need to be careful to not have wrong expectations because McLaren still have a better car than us, like quite a bit, he explained.
“We have some tracks that will be very close, some others where we’ll be further away.
“Before this race we were quite close and we never really had the fastest car apart from maybe Monaco, and in Monza we were quite strong as well.”
Meanwhile, Sainz has set his sights on helping Ferrari usurp Red Bull to be the side that is best placed to capitalise should McLaren proceed to slip up at some stage.
“McLaren definitely has the upper hand that they are the favourites for winning it,” Sainz acknowledged.
“We still have Red Bull in our sights, and obviously McLaren, if they start going south or they start having problems, so we need to keep ourselves in it.”
Asked whether beating Red Bull to second would be an achievement considering its dominance last season, Sainz predicts the reigning champions will bounce back.
“It would show good resilience by the team after a tough part of the year where we gave up a lot of points and a lot of development curve there.
“But Red Bull is going to come back strong with upgrades at the end of the season once they’ve understood what they did wrong with their car, so it’s not going to be easy to beat them either.”
