Antonio Giovinazzi insists his focus will not be trying to repeat the heroics of Charles Leclerc at Sauber next season.
In his rookie year, the Monegasque lead the Swiss team to something of a revival as he and teammate Marcus Ericsson scored more points in 2018 than Sauber had achieved since 2014.
While his announcement was made later, Giovinazzi will essentially be replacing Leclerc in the seat reserved for a Ferrari junior and looking ahead, believes he faces a much different challenge than the 21-year-old did.
“To be honest I didn’t speak much with him about this jump,” said the Italian. “I want to think about myself and don’t [try to] repeat the results Charles did this year or improve on his result.
“My target is just to do the best from my side and see. I will also have a different teammate from Charles, so everything will look different.
“I hope the car will be faster from Race 1 and we can start to push already from Melbourne,” he continued. “It will be quite tough for the first races because beside me is a world champion with a lot of years in F1.
“From my side, I need to do just my job and improve myself race by race and then we’ll see at the end of the year if we did a good job or not.”
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That teammate will be Kimi Raikkonen, who swiftly signed for Sauber on a two-year deal after learning of Ferrari’s decision to promote Leclerc for next year.
And together, Giovinazzi is confident that the Hinwil-based squad can continue their upward trend which saw them as regular top 10 contenders with Haas, Force India and Renault for much of the year.
“I see a lot of high motivation in the team from mechanics and engineers for next year as well,” Antonio noted. “So this is looking good for me for next year, so we will try and improve also the result again.
“The target for sure is to be best of the rest but it’s a really high target.”