“We weren’t quick enough at Zandvoort”: Charles Leclerc admits Ferrari lack the pace to compete with Max Verstappen
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Charles Leclerc
The qualifying session in Zandvoort was incredibly close like it had been last year. Max Verstappen took pole position, but not by much. Charles Leclerc was just 0.021 seconds behind, and his teammate, Carlos Sainz was also quite close, just around 0.092 seconds behind.
But the race was not as good for Ferrari, as it has not been the case on many occasions this season. Max Verstappen started on fresher soft tyres than the Ferrari duo and soon built a comfortable advantage. Aside from the two pit stop disasters for Carlos Sainz, the pace didn’t seem to be there for Ferrari either: Especially on the harder tyres.
As per GPFans, when asked if he could have gotten a better result in the race, Leclerc replied: “Not really, we just didn’t have the pace. We didn’t… we weren’t quick enough. So this is the main focus at the moment, to try and bring back the speed that we had at the beginning of the season. We seem to have lost it, a little bit of pace in the long runs especially.”
Charles Leclerc: ‘We were slower than expected on the medium tyres’
Ferrari, for most of the first part of the season, seemed to have the better or at the least, a comparable car to Red Bull. But that didn’t matter, cause they did not have it together as a team. Reliability is one thing, but Ferrari’s drivers and the team made many errors that have largely contributed to the large gap to Red Bull.
But in the past three races, they also seem to lack pace now. In Hungary, Charles Leclerc’s (and generally everyone’s) pace on the hards was terrible. In Belgium, they might not even have been the second-best car, as George Russell looked to be much faster than both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, and would likely have stolen a podium spot without an error.
Charles Leclerc admitted that the recent race pace was not optimal: “No, I think everybody is obviously improving but in the last races, we’ve been struggling more a bit more in race pace. Now Mercedes is also in the fight and they are very quick. They were extremely quick, especially on the harder compounds.”
While the pace on the softs was competitive, it was on the harder tyres that Ferrari couldn’t keep up, signalling a deficit in the long runs: “I think our pace on the soft was really good at the beginning. We had used tyres, [and] Max was on new, so I think the difference was more or less what we expected. But then, on the new medium, we were slower than expected, for sure.”
Ferrari have certainly squandered their chance this season – they didn’t do enough when they had the pace, and now they seem to have fallen behind in that regard. The chance is gone this season, and they’ll have to try again next season, but there’s no saying if they’ll still have this competitive a car, or that they won’t make the same mistakes again.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)