The Ferrari driver produced one of his strongest performances in recent seasons at Silverstone, taking pole for the Grand Prix and leading 42 of the 52 laps to secure his first victory since the 2024 United States Grand Prix.
Ferrari also celebrated a strong team result with Lewis Hamilton finishing third.
Although Mercedes was expected to be the team to beat at Silverstone, Ferrari surprised many by producing the fastest race package. Leclerc admitted the result exceeded the team’s own expectations and believes there is still work to do before Ferrari can be considered genuine title contenders.
Rather than setting his sights solely on another victory in Belgium, Leclerc said his priority is to rediscover the confidence and balance he found in the Ferrari during the British Grand Prix weekend.
“I don’t really focus on that,” Leclerc said when asked if he expected to fight for victory at Spa.
“I’ll be focusing on trying to get that feeling again in the car. If I have that feeling, I’m confident I can extract the maximum from this car. If I don’t, then it might be trickier.”
Ferrari made significant progress during the Silverstone weekend after finding a solution to the balance issues that had affected Leclerc for much of the season. The Monegasque driver believes understanding why the car performed so well is now just as important as chasing another win.
“As a team, we are pushing extremely hard to fight and challenge Mercedes,” he said.
“We expected a very difficult weekend at Silverstone, and before that we thought Spa would be even harder. Considering we won at Silverstone, maybe we are closer than we first thought, but that still has to be proven.”
Leclerc stressed that Ferrari cannot assume its British Grand Prix pace will automatically carry over to every circuit.
“We also need to understand why it was such an outstanding weekend compared to our expectations,” he added.
“I won’t focus only on winning because that is the wrong approach. I’ll focus on the process, getting the best feeling from the car and maximising everything it can do.”
