by SIMONE PELUSO
A nightmare race that closes a weekend to forget. Charles Leclerc is bitter, frustrated, disappointed after yet another Grand Prix without results for him, closed out of the points zone and conditioned first by a shock qualifying with elimination in Q2 and then by a totally wrong decision that definitively cancelled any possibility of scoring points at Silverstone.
The Ferrari driver, together with his team, was among the first – together with Perez and Zhou – to decide to fit intermediate tyres at the first real downpour of the race on lap 20, but the lack of consistency of the water on the track (which in the meantime had returned to being dry) condemned him to a race at the back, lapped as he was a week ago in Austria.
“It’s a nightmare that has been going on for at least 3-4 games and we have to get out of it as soon as possible – Leclerc began – Today we had a good start, but around lap 20 I had the feeling that it was starting to rain heavily in turn 15. The guys on the pit wall told me that it would start to rain heavily the following lap, so I said that the strategy (to move on to the intermediates, ed.) it would have been a little aggressive but we would have done it. Unfortunately, however, the rain arrived eight laps later, enough to destroy the tyres and require another pit stop.”
“Nothing went right. With the information I had, the move seemed aggressive, but not wrong, but the fact is that we were one of the few cars that stopped and threw the race in the toiletso we have to analyze it and I’ll look at whether, with the information I had, I could have made a better decision.”
Backtracking on updates? Not a given
Overall, however, the whole weekend was a dark one for Ferrari and Leclerc, who had been struggling since free practice with many comparison tests between the latest update in Barcelona and the previous one in Imola, which then led – before qualifying – to a step back for the Reds, discarding the latest changes. A worse condition for Leclerc than Sainz, given that the Monegasque had driven all Friday with the configuration then rejected for this weekend.
“It’s a difficult situation we find ourselves in at the moment. The update gave us the numbers we expected, but it also gave us a lot of high-speed bounce. For a track like this, we decided it was probably better to have a little less performance but more consistency, and I think that was the right call. – Leclerc pointed out – Moving forward we will analyze all the data we have on the two packages and try to understand if there is something about the new package that we have not yet understood. I think that in Hungary we will be able to go back to using the new version; it is a very different layout, but I think it is still necessary to evaluate all the information we have gathered from the comparison and make the right decision because it might not be the same as Silverstone“.
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