The pre-race plan
Like 2019, maybe even more than 2019 for the way the victory came: with a strategic masterpiece that left McLaren stunnedapparently in control of the race. The Charles Leclerc’s second Monza success it’s a mix of head and heart, strategy and emotions. Speaking at the press conference after the GP, the Monegasque shared his thoughts, starting from the winning decision – taken together with the Ferrari strategists – of aim for single pit stopsagainst the two rivals.
“Before the race, if you had asked me, the one stop was definitely what I wanted to do” declared #16, thus confirming that there was a clear and common plan. It would be wrong, however, to think that no one at Ferrari ever thought of changing strategy and making the red cars also turn to the two stops: “After 10 laps we saw that the Red Bull started to struggle with the front left on the Hard. At that point we started to doubt the one stop – Leclerc admitted – we thought it would be much more difficult because we feared that the Hard would be a more difficult tyre to bring to the end“.
The final awareness
Instead, evidently, Red Bull’s problems are not Ferrari’s: “As soon as I put the hard tyre on I started thinking again that [la sosta unica] was a possibility. And I was even more convinced when Oscar made the pit stop two or three laps later. I felt like I had more grip not having a car in frontespecially on the front tyres, and that’s where I thought the one-stop could work“.
The end of the race was a crescendo of emotions, for Leclerc but also for the public, who lap after lap realized what was materializing before their eyes. The ’97-born driver revealed that he had understood a little in advance, from inside the cockpit, that the race was increasingly in his hands: “In the last five or six laps I felt like I had made it.The tires were good and I realized that Oscar was not fast enough to catch me before the end of the race if I didn’t make any mistakes.“. Mission accomplished.
#Leclerc #Single #stop #thought #understood
