After losing the Monaco race, Charles Leclerc was quite angry with his Ferrari team, whose decisions in Monte Carlo had ensured that Monegasque had dropped from first to fourth place in the home game and continued to gain ground in the fight for the world championship Max Verstappen lost. “This must not happen to us,” he had said.
Leclerc complained about “too many mistakes” at Scuderia, and team boss Mattia Binotto has to admit frankly: “We made mistakes in our assessment and we made mistakes in our decisions. And now we have to see what made us make them To make decisions.”
Leclerc had complained about two situations in the race in particular as errors – both times at the pit stop. He couldn’t understand why Ferrari had initially brought him into the pits for intermediates on lap 18. Two laps earlier, Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez had switched to the intermediate tires and put Ferrari under strategic pressure.
Ferrari initially wanted to bring Sainz into the pits, but he refused and wanted to wait until he could switch directly from rain tires to slicks. Shortly afterwards, however, Leclerc came into the pits for that strategy and fell behind Pérez. That was Ferrari’s first mistake.
“We underestimated the pace of the intermediates, just like our advantage over the other cars,” admits Binotto. Pérez was significantly faster on intermediates than Leclerc on rain tires and was able to close the gap in the two laps.
That leaves two conclusions for Binotto: “We should have brought him in sooner or we should have just stayed out on the rain tires and defended our position.” Binotto can clearly analyze this error. “But what brought us to it needs a little more time.”
Leclerc knew nothing about intermediates
Incidentally, it did not occur to Leclerc to refuse the pit stop like team-mate Sainz: “I didn’t know that we would go to intermediates,” he says. “We didn’t have enough time to talk about it. I got the order and I listened. I think the goal was to respond to Pérez.”
Incidentally, the tactic did not necessarily have to work for the Mexican, because at first he was stuck behind McLaren’s Lando Norris, who drove in himself a lap later and thus did not stop the Red Bull driver – otherwise Leclerc might have been back on the road before him route taken.
But Binotto doesn’t want to talk about bad luck in this regard: “It’s not about luck or bad luck. We just made mistakes in our assessment. And if you lead in Monaco and then don’t finish second but fourth, then we did something wrong.”
Binotto defends double stop
According to Leclerc, the second mistake was that he had been brought into the pits a few laps later on the same lap as team-mate Carlos Sainz to switch to dry tyres, which cost him the decisive time so that Max Verstappen was able to come out of the pits just ahead of him later .
“We did it because we knew that the dry tires are much faster,” defends the team boss. “We thought that was a good way to undercut against Red Bull. Basically the opposite of what it was before when they went on the intermediate first. They wanted to undercut and then we did the same with the slicks.”
However, the Italian saves precise answers about the circumstances for later: “It was a fairly complex situation,” says Binotto and announces a lot of meetings after the race to understand the situation as a team. “We need to discuss a little more and go into a little more detail,” he says.
Leclerc: “Will come back stronger”
Leclerc is also still behind his team and is convinced that the problems will be overcome. “Obviously it’s disappointing and it hurts, especially at home, but that’s the way it is and I’ll work with the team now, we’ll all try to understand it together,” he said.
“We had everything to win. The pace was very strong in the first stint and things went extremely well in the wet. But then unfortunately everything went against us. It hurts at home but that’s life and we’re getting stronger Come back.”