“We were not able to recover,” Ferrari looking for the cause of Charles Leclerc’s excessive tyre degradation at the Japanese GP
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Charles Leclerc
Mattia Binotto, Ferrari’s team principal, let out his assumptions on the high degradation. Charles Leclerc ended his race on P2 but later got down to P3 after a five-second time penalty for cutting the last chicane, a move that ultimately decided the championship in hands of Max Verstappen. But Charles looked strong on the wet track of Suzuka with a significant pace to challenge Max for the win but lost out to him by a huge margin of 25+ seconds.
For some part, it could be blamed on Charles, but the pace at the start didn’t stay much in hand for Leclerc and he started to drop off from Verstappen. This was due to the high degradation of his front tyres that was quite noticed at the end of the race. Although, Charles was looking strong enough at the start with the new tyres that turned into slicks at the end which might have caused Leclerc the mistake in the end.
The F1-75 has shown much worse tyre degradation than the RB-18 for some races now. As reported by GPFans, Mattia Binotto explained the situation: “On degradation, we saw already on Friday that by pushing too much on the first lap, we simply just destroyed the front tyres in a way that we were not able to recover.”
Mattia Binotto explains the solution to Charles Leclerc’s tyre problems
Ferrari’s F1-75 was a success, though it didn’t last as long as they would have hoped, Ferrari did win a few races. But as of the Japan GP, Mattia confirms no more upgrades for the car after bringing out a new floor in Japan. With no tyre problems, Mattia was convinced about the floor’s work.
The team’s tyre problems have been discussed for a while now. While in Austria, it was Red Bull who suffered with the issue, in general, it has been Ferrari who have been the worse of the two on that front. This is why they can compete with the British team in qualifying, but their performance massively falls away in the races.
Binotto explained that the floor worked as expected: “On a single lap, the pace and speed were there but in terms of tyre management, certainly, we could have done something different. It worked as expected. We tested it early on Friday but it was fully wet, so on Saturday morning we had data in dry conditions and the floor was working as we were hoping for.”
Ferrari will lose the constructor championship most certainly at Austin. Binotto was not ‘happy’ but still satisfied with the performance of his car this season as they were quite competitive at the top.
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Soham Raj Jain
(480 Articles Published)