F1 | Leclerc: “We are the only ones to throw the race in the toilet like this”

Charles Leclerc continues to navigate the stormy sea, but he can’t seem to find a way out of a period that he himself has bluntly defined as “a nightmare”.

Zero points obtained at the British Grand Prix held today at Silverstone due to a strategic error that occurred in the first part of the race.

Starting – like everyone else – on slicks, Leclerc pitted for Intermediates too early. The rain, which was already falling at turn 15, came down heavily only 8-9 laps later, ruining the Monegasque’s intermediates beyond repair.

“It’s been a nightmare for 3-4 races now, unfortunately, and we have to try to get out of it,” Leclerc said after his race. “I had a good start today, but it was a very bad call. Everything went wrong with that decision made to switch from slicks to Intermediates after the first stint. The messages and information they had suggested that, instead, it could have been the right choice.”

“It was raining a lot in Turn 15, I said that on the last lap with the slicks it was raining a lot, so I tried to bring forward the pit stop, but the rain came 8-9 laps later. That was obviously the end of our race, because that time was enough to destroy my tyres and we had to do another pit stop. It was frustrating, another weekend to forget and they are starting to become really a lot.”

“The call was aggressive and from the information I had it seemed right, but the truth of the matter is that we were the only car that stopped for tires at that point and that threw the race in the toilet. I’ll have to figure out if we could have made a better decision.”

Leclerc returned to talk about the moment that Ferrari is going through, in crisis since the innovations on the SF-24 were introduced. Not only that, because even the call to the pits will have to be analyzed by him and the team to avoid things like this from happening again.

“It’s really tough and it’s hard to explain. The last 4 races have been worse than a nightmare. But we have to keep working to get out of this situation.”

“It’s hard to find positive things on days like these. I have to talk to my team and study how to make decisions. I speak for myself, the ones I make, and understand why we made the wrong ones today.”

Finally, Leclerc spoke about the updates. The new features give the expected numbers, but there are – as already stated by the drivers themselves in the previous races – collateral movements, such as bouncing, to make everything more complicated.

“It’s a difficult situation to explain and deal with at the moment. The new parts we brought do what they’re supposed to do and what we expected, but here they gave too much bounce in the fast parts of the track. And that’s why we decided to go back. Have less performance, but more consistency. Now we’ll analyze the data we have from the two packages to understand what to do.”