Charles Leclerc makes ‘aggressive’ Ferrari request in F1 title race

Charles Leclerc has urged Ferrari to be “aggressive” when it comes to upgrades as he believes it is “much more significant” this season than in previous years.

A championship that at one stage looked destined for Mercedes has been brought back in contention with both Ferrari and McLaren making significant improvements.

Charles Leclerc seeks Ferrari upgrades in F1 title race

In the early stages of 2026, Ferrari was the only team capable of keeping close to the Mercedes but the Italian team has closed the gap even more as the season goes on, earning wins at the Barcelona-Catalunya and British Grand Prix.

Heading into the summer break, Ferrari trails Mercedes by 72 points but has outscored them in four of the past five races. Ferrari could in theory reduce the gap to 14 by the end of the next grand prix weekend.

With that in mind, Leclerc has urged the team to be “aggressive” with its upgrade plans and suggested development was more this season than in years gone by.

“It’s a championship that every upgrade is so much more significant than in the past because it makes us do such a big step forward,” he said in Hungary.

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“We’ve seen it with McLaren this weekend, so it’s going to be important that we stay on top of it, and that we keep being aggressive, as aggressive as we’ve been with the development program, and we’ll see how it goes in time.”

Leclerc though was left confused why Ferrari’s predictions have not come true. He said that in the races where they had expected to do poorly, they had won and in the races they expected to be strong, they struggled.

“It’s a disappointing weekend,” he said of the Hungarian race. “I think the thing that is standing out for me after the last three races is that, out of the last three races, there were two races where we were expecting to struggle, and we finished first and second and in the race where we expected to do well, we finished fourth and fifth.

“So there’s clearly a tendency, and it’s not that one car is doing well because he’s doing exceptionally in the car, I mean, both cars seem to have that tendency of being good in the weekend where we expected to struggle and struggling in the weekend where we thought we would be good so this is to be understood.”

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