From 'question' to 'suggestion', Leclerc resists Marcos' plans

At Suzuka the strategy works

In his years spent behind the wheel of Ferrari Charles Leclerc he has never been particularly lucky with strategies. Many of the red's fans still remember with dismay the first half of the 2022 season, when several races were thrown away by the Cavallino team precisely due to a lack of clarity in the management of the race tactics to be adopted on the #16 car. At Suzuka, last Sunday, the opposite finally happened: Leclerc managed to move up from eighth to fourth thanks to an excellent race pace, to the speed of the SF-24 but also thanks to a risky strategywith just one stop against the two of its rivals, which worked perfectly.

Perfect management and winning call

Leclerc was very skilled in manage tire degradation especially in the first stint and the wall instructed him – not without some confusion – on what to do. But keeping the potential variables under control in an extremely tactical race like the Japanese one was anything but easy both for the driver inside the cockpit and for his track engineer at the wall, the much-discussed Spaniard Xavier Marcos. An interesting – and in some ways also funny – collection of radio messages between the Monegasque and his engineer during the GP testifies to how they had been a whole series of 'battle plans' prepared and how the choice of which strategy to adopt was the result of constant 'negotiation' between the two parties. In the end it should be emphasized in Suzuka how it was Leclerc himself who pushed the team in the right directiondirecting the team towards the most profitable 'Plan'.