Leclerc didn’t expect Mercedes to be so fast in the Belgian race
Charles Leclerc insists that the Belgian GP was not a “positive weekend” for his Ferrari Formula 1 team despite taking pole and finishing fourth and only 8.5 seconds behind original winner George Russell.
Leclerc, who subsequently moved up to third when the English driver was disqualified for being underweight, noted that a strong performance was outweighed by the fact that Mercedes proved faster in the race.
He acknowledged that he expected that McLaren and Red Bull would be more competitive than Ferrari, but not Mercedes.
“If it was a Red Bull in front then I think it would have been a positive weekend,” he said. “But now it was a Mercedes, which we thought we were on a par with, and they had the edge on us. I don’t consider this result a very positive one.”
He added: “I think fourth was what I thought would be the best result possible today, with two McLarens in front, and one Red Bull.
“But again, that’s what makes me not so happy about today, is that we have two Mercedes and one McLaren in front, and the Mercedes, we thought that we were on a par with them. So yeah, worse than expected.”
Like others Leclerc expected McLaren to be the team to beat in Sunday’s race.
“I personally thought that McLaren had huge advantage of pace for this weekend, which I saw a little bit less today,” he said.
“They were still the fastest, probably with Red Bull and Mercedes today, but I thought McLaren had the edge.
“It’s good to see that everybody’s so close, but unfortunately, we are still the fourth fastest team, and the top three keeps changing, but we are consistently behind them, on a par with Mercedes. We just need more pace.”
As the first stops as rivals pitted Leclerc suggested to the team that he if he was going to be undercut, he should go long.
However he then stopped on lap 12, just one lap after Lewis Hamilton, Sergio Perez and Oscar Piastri, the cars immediately around him.
“It’s very, very difficult to know at that point,” he said when asked by this writer about his radio request.
“Because when you have so many cars, obviously we were in a position where second on track, when you are getting undercut by one car, two cars, three cars, four cars, it starts to be quite tricky, and you take a lot of risks.
“It was just better to align ourselves to the other strategy. We didn’t know even what was the hard like, because we hadn’t run it before the race.
“So all of this, I don’t think it’s fair to say that we did a mistake at that point, and I understood the point of view of the team.
“I just felt like the raw pace is not good enough. And when it’s like this, unfortunately, you can do whatever you want with the strategy, but you’re always going to lose places. We are just not fast enough.”
Leclerc suggested that it would have been difficult to replicate the one-stop strategy used so well by Russell.
“It was one of our plans, but I knew that it was very, very, very unlikely for me to do so,” he said.
“Just for the reason I explained before, when you are in front to keep going and to get undercut by three, four cars and just lose so many positions if the one-stop doesn’t work, it was just better to align ourselves with the guys behind.
“But we knew it wasn’t too far, But I think they just had more pace, so they made the one-stop work, because they were super, super strong today. So we had it on our card. It was just not possible in our race situation.”
Asked to summarise the season so far he admitted that Ferrari has work to do.
“Our first half really good,” he said. “I think we couldn’t hope for better. We maximised the potential of the car. Then we’ve had four races where we’re going extreme setups from extreme setups.
“And for me, it was just impossible to get to quali and to know where the limit of the car was. And we lost a lot of points.
“And the last two races, we focused again on maximising the results, and I think we did, but just not fast enough, as I said.
“So that’s where we really need to focus and to do a step for the second half if we want to have any better results.”
Adam Cooper F1 