Charles Leclerc claimed the opportunity to race against Fernando Alonso was the highlight en route to scoring his first Formula 1 points in Azerbaijan.
The Monegasque ran in the points for the majority of Sunday’s race around the streets of Baku, lapping at the same pace as the Red Bull drivers in the first stint albeit thanks to a tyre advantage.
A few late retirements late on also helped the F2 champion but his sixth-place finish was fully deserved as he achieved a result the Swiss team hasn’t managed since Felipe Nasr in Sochi in 2015.
“It’s an amazing weekend for the whole team and a good boost for the future,” Leclerc commented.
“It’s good to have a good one where we put everything together. Obviously, we have been helped by the circumstances but we took our opportunity here.”
It was the first time in F1 that the man many tip to one day drive a Ferrari, where he is currently the top man in their academy, has shown his potential, but keeping to that moniker, he knows he needs to keep improving.
“We need to take that and work to get better in the race. We should enjoy the moment and tomorrow back to work for Barcelona,” he said.
“Our race pace is stronger than our qualifying pace at the moment. In FP2 we really saw that. Now we need to investigate that and make our low fuel pace better.
“If we manage to do that we should be very competitive because our race pace at the beginning of the race was really great, then at the end with low fuel we struggled a bit more.
“But P6 at the end is great.”
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Given that the 20-year-old has grown up with Ferrari, it’s no surprise that the part of the race he most enjoyed was the chance to go wheel-to-wheel with his childhood hero.
“Fernando was a driver I was watching when I was five years old in Monaco so to race with him today is quite crazy,” Leclerc admitted.
“To have been able to fight with him, okay we had the tyre advantage, but even at the end of the race we were looking strong compared to McLaren. The whole race we were looking strong compared to them.”
