F1 pundit's intriguing theory for Charles Leclerc's mistake-prone season with Ferrari

F1 pundit Peter Windsor feels one of the major reasons behind Charles Leclerc's mistake-prone season at Ferrari is because he wants to compete with Max Verstappen at the front. The young driver has had an error-laden campaign, replete with multiple crashes in qualifying while pushing too hard, leaving him compromised.

According to Windsor, it's due to the benchmark Leclerc has set for himself while racing. In his live stream, Windsor said that Leclerc always fancies racing Max Verstappen's Red Bull or Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes.

However, with Ferrari lagging behind the duo, Leclerc ends up pushing too much and making mistakes. Windsor said:

“Because Leclerc’s yardstick is racing with Max and to some extent, you know, Lewis at the front of a Grand Prix, when he’s not in that situation, he doesn’t really care that much about anything other than just trying to get back into the situation.

"That’s possibly why we see him making more mistakes and doing funny things, because he’s just desperate to get to where he wants to be."

He added:

“But in a car like a Ferrari, which is eating its tyres, relatively low downforce, they don’t seem to be able to generate very good downforce on high downforce circuits.

"Therefore that leads on to everything else, the bouncing, the kerb strike, the car changing over the fuel load, all those things. It’s a really difficult ask for a guy like Leclerc to be patient and bring the car home.”

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Charles Leclerc's mistake-prone 2023 F1 season

Charles Leclerc

Charles Leclerc has had far too many errors this season. It started with one at the start of the race in Australia where he beached his car on the opening lap. The next was in Miami where the Monagesque crashed his car during qualifying.

Leclerc did the same thing at Zandvoort, where he talked about being mystified by the car and that he was not quite pushing too hard. Following all these mistakes, Leclerc find himself behind his teammate Carlos Sainz in the championship even though the Spaniard is considered to be the slower of the two Ferrari drivers.

Ahead of the Singapore GP this weekend, Leclerc (111) trails fifth-placed Sainz (117) in the driver standings.