Ferrari’s Saturday at Interlagos was spent limiting the damage. Charles Leclerc will start from the front row tomorrow in the long race of the Brazilian Grand Prix, so he has decided to sacrifice the Sprint day a bit. In the Sprint Shootout, in fact, he decided not to fit a new soft tire in Q3, saving it for tomorrow.
A choice that relegated him to seventh place on the grid in the short race. A position which he then improved in the Sprint, climbing up to fifth position. A result which, added to Carlos Sainz’s eighth place, allowed Mercedes to gain only two points in the fight for second place in the Constructors’ standings thanks to George Russell’s fourth place and Lewis Hamilton’s seventh.
If the target is the rivals of the Brackley team, in the end it didn’t go too bad either. What worries the Monegasque, however, is the abysmal gap made up not only by Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, but also by Lando Norris’s McLaren, which has shown an all too evident growth in recent outings.
“I expected something more, but compared to our competitors, and I’m thinking of Mercedes, it didn’t go badly today. But if we look at Red Bull and McLaren, the latter especially seems to have taken a big step forward: on all tracks, now he is much better than us in the race. We have to find solutions, because our package is not worth theirs at the moment”, Leclerc told Sky Sport F1.
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-23
Regarding his race, he explained that he had to manage a lot in the early stages due to the high temperatures, to prevent the engine from overheating. But at the distance his pace wasn’t bad and allowed him to catch Hamilton after passing Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri at the start. Tomorrow, therefore, the front row could be a weapon to exploit.
“I struggled in the first part of the race, because I had to save a lot due to the temperatures. Tomorrow, starting second, we will have fewer cars in front and we hope that this can help us. But the feeling in the first laps wasn’t bad. I knew that It was a long race, so I controlled at the start, plus I had to manage the engine, so towards the end I was able to push a little more.”
When he was then asked whether today’s race might have cast doubt on whether it was the right choice to keep a new soft tire for tomorrow’s race, Charles instead seemed very convinced that it was the right move.
“I honestly don’t have this doubt. If we also look at Tsunoda’s race, he was behind me and we had the same pace. Normally this isn’t the case, but today he had a new tire and we saw the benefit. This makes me quite optimistic for Tomorrow”.
“Then we have to be careful what we say: optimistic yes, but we won’t go on to win. The target for the weekend is to beat the Mercedes and today we could have done better by putting a new tire in qualifying. But by how much? Maybe just one position, so for me it was worth making the choice we made”, he concluded.
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