It almost seems as if Charles Leclerc had bought his victory in Monaco by making a deal with the Formula 1 devil. His four races since then have been shocking. In Silverstone, Leclerc failed to score any points for the third time. He and Ferrari failed with an overambitious rain strategy and made an already bad weekend even worse.
The race inspired desperate attempts right from the start. After a botched qualifying session, Leclerc only started from eleventh place. Although he gained three places at the start, he was stuck in eighth place behind Lance Stroll until lap 13. When a light drizzle started a few laps later, he had finally freed himself from the Aston Martin, but was already nine seconds behind his teammate Carlos Sainz.
“You know that if you don’t do something gigantic, nothing will happen, that’s part of the problem,” said Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur after the race. When Leclerc arrived in the first sector on lap 19, it seemed to be raining harder. He skidded briefly and immediately asked the pits to change from slicks to intermediates.
“With the information in the car, I thought that was correct,” Leclerc defended himself. Looking back, he and race engineer Bryan Bozzi – based on the radio protocols – never seemed to be on the same wavelength. Originally, shortly before the skid, Bozzi’s weather report was: “We expect this to be the strongest, and ten minutes more like that.”
Weather chaos on Ferrari radio: Who was to blame for the strategy blunder?
Leclerc briefly questioned his own decision to stop on the drier back part of the track, but then reinforced it again on the Hangar Straight without any further input from Bozzi. After the race, he explained his understanding of the situation: “It rained quite a lot at Turn 15 and I was told the rain would be very heavy on this lap. I stopped to anticipate that.”
In fact, Leclerc only received an adjusted weather report with more rain when he was already in the pit lane and asked if more rain was coming. Bozzi’s answer: “In five minutes. Then maybe later.” Somewhere in the team-driver communication and mutual understanding, they had taken a wrong turn.
“That was obviously the end of our race,” Leclerc summarises. There was only a brief drizzle. Intermediates were completely useless, he lost several seconds per lap and was even lapped. To top it all off, when the rain actually started a few laps later, he had to get new intermediates again. Because he had ruined the old ones in the dry. Then he was 16th.
He made the switch back to slicks perfectly, but after the gigantic loss of time, he could no longer do more than snatch P14 from Valtteri Bottas. “It was certainly wrong, we would probably have finished sixth, but we made the decision together,” said Vasseur, apportioning responsibility. “I don’t want to say it was a good one, of course it wasn’t, but I’m not frustrated. Hamilton and Russell rode out on the same lap. It was right on the edge of being a good call.”
Leclerc exhausted after series of disasters at Ferrari: Words are no longer enough
After the race, Leclerc is only really struck by the impact of the recent situation. No points in Montreal, Spielberg and Silverstone. A distant fifth place in Barcelona. An update that doesn’t work. “I hardly have any words to describe it. Four races, worse than a nightmare. Hopefully we can come back soon.”
But he can’t really imagine how. After Silverstone, the team now has to solve the update problem. The parts brought in Barcelona provided the expected downforce, but came with the bounce that was definitely not expected. This was also the source of Leclerc’s Silverstone problem. He had done comparison tests with the new parts on Friday. It was only on Saturday that he switched back to the old parts based on the findings.
It is unclear what will happen next at Ferrari. Which car will be at the start in Hungary? The decision has not yet been made, confirms Leclerc: “We will analyse all the data from the two packages and try to understand what we have not yet understood.”