Charles Leclerc says the breakthrough in his performance this year came when he began adapting the car to his driving style, instead of the other way around.

The 21-year-old, who is in his second full season of Formula 1, was out-qualified by his team mate for all bar one of the first eight races. However he’s beaten Sebastian Vettel on every Saturday since then.

Leclerc said he’s made a series of three major steps forward during the season so far. “I started the year trying to adapt myself to the car,” he said. “After a few races I understood that maybe that wasn’t the right way to go forward and I asked the team to maybe adapt a little bit more the car to my driving. Then we did quite a big step forward.

“Then I don’t think I had the right mindset going into qualifying, which I changed. I went with an approach that was a lot more step-by-step from Q1 to Q3 to finally do the best lap time in Q3. That helped my qualifying pace.”

His third improvement came a few races ago when he found a way to improve his race pace and tyre management. “I had a set-up that was quite aggressive which was good for qualifying but not good enough for [the] race,” he said. “So I tried to adopt that too and it seems to work and pays off for the race.”

Since the summer break Leclerc has taken three pole positions, two wins and a second place – the latter a narrow defeat to Vettel which left Leclerc unhappy with the team’s strategy after it swapped their running order on the track.

“All of these things I go straight to analyse after a race what has gone wrong and what I need to do to improve and that’s what I’ve done and it seems to pay off.”

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2019 F1 season