Leclerc Thought He Was On For A Podium After Confusing Checo For Max

Posted on September 25, 2023 | by Harry Eagleton The next time someone says to you, ‘Sorry, I’m trying to do everything at a hundred miles an hour here’ as an excuse for making a mistake, you might want to think about this story and give them a little more sympathy. During the Japanese Grand Prix, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc confused double-retiree, Sergio Perez, for Red Bull teammate, Max Verstappen. And it led to quite the disappointing realisation. In between navigating the infamous 130R, keeping his tyres in check, and literally doing everything at (well over) 100mph, poor Charles made an unfortunate assumption. “I thought I was doing a podium until the last lap where I actually looked at the board and I was P4,” he told media including The Race. When passing Checo on track, he thought he’d actually passed a broken-down Verstappen – leading him to spend the rest of his race thinking he was on for a trip to the podium. That is until his final-lap realisation. Oof. Leclerc said he thought Verstappen had slowed down at one stage – on the “exit of Turn 14. I think it was the VSC, he basically stopped on the left and we all overtook him” – but, told that was likely Perez instead being lapped, he said: “Oh right OK. That’s what it was I thought Max was out of the race at that moment it was just confusing for me.” We’ve all done it: thought we’d absolutely smashed something out of the park only to realise at the last minute that, in fact, we’d just overtaken a driver who’d crashed instead of the one relentlessly winning championships all by himself. OK, maybe not quite like that, but I think you get what we mean. What did you make of Leclerc’s performance in Japan? P4 still ain’t bad