Charles Leclerc warns Red Bull’s “beginning of the season” form will return in Spain

Charles Leclerc expects Red Bull to return to their impressive early-season F1 form at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.

Red Bull have struggled relatively-speaking in recent races as they’ve come under threat from Ferrari and McLaren.

Lando Norris out-paced Max Verstappen in Miami, while the McLaren driver finished just 0.7s behind at the chequered flag in Imola.

Verstappen could only finish sixth in Monaco as Charles Leclerc took his first win in nearly two years.

It was a similar story in Canada though but Verstappen put together an impressive weekend to take the victory in chaotic conditions.

The RB20 struggles on bumpy circuits which require kerb-riding - something that isn’t a necessity to be competitive in Barcelona this weekend.

Giving his view on Red Bull, Leclerc told media including Crash.net in Barcelona: “Me personally and I am not speaking on behalf of the team but my personal opinion is that we will see a stronger Red Bull and a Red Bull that we have seen at the beginning of the season back here in Barcelona.

“Just because the track layout normally Red Bull is very fast around here. I do also believe that the last four races from Miami to the last race in Canada was a lot about kerb riding - and it’s probably not the one strengths of the Red Bull. I believe we will see them back to a true, really good level this weekend. However, we still have some new parts in the car for this weekend.

“If that helps us to be very close here it’s a good sign for the rest because normally Barcelona is quite representative for the rest of the season.

“It’s going to be an interesting weekend so if we’re in the fight here it’s a good sign for the rest of the season.”

Leclerc suffered his first non-score of the year last time out in Canada with Ferrari simply off the pace.

His race was ruined by an engine issue which cost him around 0.5s on the straights.

Reflecting on Canada, Leclerc added: “We found a solution. I am not going to go into the details of what that particular issue was. Obviously we were losing a lot of lap times on the straights. We had to retire the car. This was difficult to control until we actually understood now what went wrong.

“We understood, we fixed it. We have been focusing on it in the last few days since we understood the engine issue was the lack of performance on the Saturday. We didn’t manage things the way we could have had.

“There was probably more performance in the car. I am confident we will be back to our level here in Barcelona.”