“We had the potential to fight Red Bull throughout the championship and we didn’t”. Charles Leclerc in Abu Dhabi he won the duel against Sergio Perez to conquer the place of honor in the championship, but the iris Max Verstappen had already largely put him on the bulletin board in Japan at Suzuka with still four races to go. The Ferrari driver realized at Spa in Belgium that the world title was by now a utopia, but the almost 150 points gap in the standings from Verstappen is too heavy a deficit that does not reflect the real performance of a duo, the one formed by Leclerc and by Ferrari, capable of signing 10 pole positions out of 22.
At the beginning of the season, in addition to excelling on Saturday, Leclerc also won in Bahrain and Australia, the latter overwhelming victory which put Verstappen and Red Bull with their backs to the wall. The response from the Anglo-Austrian team and the reigning champion arrived punctually at Imola, a weekend in which the RB18 lightened thanks to an initial diet was superior to the F1-75 in front of the Maranello team’s home crowd. In Miami the script was similar, in the first stint with the medium tire Verstappen had much less degradation than Leclerc managing to pass him on the track and to stretch before the pit stop.
Ferrari’s response in terms of developments arrived in Barcelona, which proved highly effective. Leclerc was able to easily take pole position despite a spin in the first attempt, while Verstappen instead recorded problems with the DRS due to a diet that had negative sides that were also confirmed on race Sunday. Leclerc was flying towards success, but the first knockout to the power unit opened the doors to victory for Verstappen, the new leader of the World Championship, a record he never let go until the end of the season.
Not having realized a concrete technical advantage between spring and summer remains a great regret for Leclerc: “The innovations that we had brought to Spain, as well as working, had put us back ahead of Red Bull – the words of Leclerc interviewed by the German newspaper Auto Motor und Sport – but we have a problem with the power unit. In Munich we made a mistake with the strategy and in Baku we stopped again. Then in Canada instead there was the penalty to be served on the starting grid. We had the speed to win, but we weren’t able to build a technically positive momentum. It was hard to accept.”
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