Silverstone hasn’t been kind to Charles Leclerc of late, and remarkably the Ferrari Formula 1 driver’s frustrating P14 in last weekend’s wet race replicated his result at the same venue in 2024.
The difference is that at this stage last year he’d had a much better season, winning in Monaco and lying third in the championship on 150 points, whereas this year he’s fifth on only 119 and has yet to secure a victory.
To be fair he has logged four podium finishes whereas team mate Lewis Hamilton has yet to make the top three.
Nevertheless it’s not been the year that he was expecting given the momentum that the team had at the end of 2024.
“It’s a bit of a shame, because until now, I kept saying that we were maximising the package that we had,” he said after Silverstone when I asked him to sum up the year so far.
“But clearly today I did not maximise the package that I had, at least on the Sunday. Very often on the Saturday, I think we felt like we left something on the table.
“Very often coming the Sunday, we always put everything together and since the beginning of the season. I don’t have much more to say, but today, clearly, I left points on the table, and that’s not nice.”
The reality is that Sunday at Silverstone was a complete nightmare for Leclerc. He was one of several drivers who followed George Russell into the pits for slicks at the end of the formation lap, a call that didn’t pay off.
“For sure, this did not help,” he said. “However, we were kind of nowhere the whole race. And when I say nowhere, it’s like, really nowhere. I was a second off and on top of that, I was doing lots of mistakes. I was really struggling to keep the car on track.
“So it was an incredibly difficult day. I need to analyse what was going on, what did I do in terms of tools, in terms of setup, in terms of driving that made everything worse, because today was extremely difficult.”
Pressed on the call for slicks he said: “That was my decision. I thought the first and second sector was kind of for slicks third sector was wet, but this I expected it. I had seen it, but I expected the track to dry up a lot quicker. It did not.
“And I think we were quite a few to have done that, mistakes of thinking that it will dry out quickly. This is part of the reason why we had a bad race.
“But I would say that the biggest part is the lack of pace today, and on that, I want the answers before going back home. So I’ll work hard to try and understand what was going on there.”
In his desperation to make up ground he became embroiled in a fraught battle with his old team mate Carlos Sainz that left the Spaniard frustrated.
“I did speak to him. I mean, Turn 4, it was aggressive, but I don’t regret that. That’s the way I had to do it. It was the only place on track that I could overtake.
“The one in Turn 15 was a mistake from my side, and that was clearly my fault. And I went to see Carlos for that, because that I know cost him points, and I’m sorry for that.”
At the end of the day the main issue was an overall lack of speed relative to Hamilton, who was himself disappointed to be only fourth at the flag.
“I didn’t see Lewis’s pace, but for sure, he was much, much stronger than me,” said Leclerc. “So the only positive I’ll say is that whenever you’ve got Lewis in the same car and being much faster than me today, there are definitely some things that I will learn from a day like this.
“When you struggle as a team and the two drivers are struggling, it’s a lot more difficult to know what’s going wrong. There we’ve got an example extreme in both ways.”
Leclerc is in no doubt about what he needs from the car in the second half of the year, and the hope is that a upgrade package scheduled for Spa will help.
“Eventually, it’s the performance that we need. We’ve got some upgrades coming, which will cure some particular weaknesses of the car, which I think will help us in some phases of the corner.
“I won’t go too much into detail, but again, I think there are some weaknesses. We’ve identified them, and we’ll try and fix them as soon as possible.”
Regarding the upgrades he added: “It’s still early days, but we’ll see how it goes. It’s still two weeks.
“I know that everybody’s pushing very hard production-wise, to try and give us upgrades as soon as possible. If they are here, I hope it can help us to do a significant step.”
Adam Cooper F1 