Ferrari and the Zoff on the radio-almost a classic in the Formula 1 season 2025. Also at the race in Canada there were heated discussions again between the driver and engineer. This time the focus: Charles Leclerc, who seemed anything but satisfied with his team’s strategy department and questioned the tactics critically several times.
First of all, the Monegassen, who started on hard tires, was told that you would go to Plan B. However, Leclerc would rather have Plan C – so far everything in the frame. However, when he was put on hard tires in round 28, he was already skeptical: “I don’t understand this choice,” he said.
And a little later he followed: “Why did we get into the box? I just said that the tires were okay.”
The other way around, it was around the second stop when Leclerc was out of too long: “What are we waiting for with the stop?” He asked. The response from the team that you don’t want too many rounds on the medium was nonsense for him: “I don’t understand that. For me, the medium is a good tire.”
Leclerc: one -off would be better
After the race, the Ferrari driver explains his train of thought: “I was pretty sure that the one-time stop would have been better for me,” Leclerc explains his surprise over the early first stop.
“I thought I had handled the tires well at the beginning, and then saw in the first stint that the medium drivers could push quite confidently on their tires. So I was quite convinced that the one-time stop was the right way. But then we decided differently,” he flinched with his shoulders.
The plan C proposed by Leclerc was probably the one -time stop. “At some point we agreed, but then the team decided to rely on two stops, which I did not agree to at the moment,” he says. “But ultimately the team has more information on the pit wall than I do in the car.”
Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur admits that you have less to lose in the field and can take a risk, “but it would have been a little too optimistic for us to go through 50 laps with the hard tire,” said the Frenchman.
“We were probably missing a few rounds at the weekend to better assess that.” Incidentally, this was also due to a mistake from Leclerc, which after an accident on Friday almost missed the entire training day, including Longruns.
“The bad result was up to me”
Nevertheless, Leclerc remains convinced that a stop would have been better for him. However, he also believes that it would have made no difference for him in the end and that he would have been fifth anyway. “P5 was the best that was possible.”
The fact that it did not become a better result, but he is solely responsible for this: “Maybe the strategy could have been better today, but ultimately it was the starting position that thrown us back today,” he admits. “The bad result was more due to my mistake in P1 and traffic yesterday than on everything else.”
Leclerc had only tackled the race from starting position eight after making a mistake in Q3 behind Isack Hadjar and almost driven into the wall. Without that, a better result could have been possible, but Leclerc waves.
“I don’t want to argue with ” at the end of the day. I just didn’t bring it together completely,” he admits.
“I think Mercedes probably had the upper hand this weekend, Red Bull is constant, McLaren was a bit behind, and we were in her area. Where we ended up exactly, I don’t know, but this weekend I probably didn’t get the maximum out of the car because I think the potential was good.”
Vasseur: In Canada, a clean version failed
The potential had indicated with Leclerc’s best time in the first sector in the broken Q3 round, because according to Vasseur, there was actually its weak point. “I don’t want to say that we would have brought the pole, but we would have been good,” he says.
But: “We have made too many mistakes in total, starting with the crash in FT1, the mistake in qualifying, the marmot in the race. In the end, the distances are so tight. I not only speak of lap times or racing results, but that the positions change from one weekend to the next,” said Vasseur.
As a good example of this, he takes Mercedes. “They were nowhere else for the last three weekends, and now they have both cars on the podium. I don’t think they have completely changed the car,” he says. “You were well prepared from the first Friday training. To be honest, our focus was not always there this weekend.”
In Austria in two weeks, he demands a clean weekend from his team. “This is exactly what we failed in Canada.”