Charles Leclerc says Ferrari’s race pace was “just not good enough” after recovering from 12th on the grid to finish seventh.
The Ferrari driver qualified second behind pole winner Sergio Perez but was demoted ten places on the grid for exceeding his maximum allocation of power unit components.After starting on the soft tyres, Leclerc rose from 12th on the grid to eventually finish in seventh place, seven seconds behind team mate Sainz.
“A good first stint, a good start,” Leclerc said. “I think really good management on the softs, which was positive.”
He began to struggle for pace when he closed on team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr.
“On the hard [tyre], I got within a second, one lap, to Carlos with the DRS. Then unfortunately I lost the DRS and then from that moment onwards you are losing too much downforce when you are one second to one-and-a-half and I was just staying there for the rest of the race.”
After pitting for hard tyres just before the Safety Car when Lance Stroll retired, Leclerc was frustrated when his race engineer Xavier Marcos Padros failed to inform him that Lewis Hamilton ahead had pitted under Safety Car.
“Try to push from Safety Car line one for Hamilton, he just pitted,” Marcos Padros radioed to his driver. “Xavi, you need to tell me that before!,” an exasperated Leclerc replied. “Come on!”
“I thought we were clear and we weren’t fighting anybody,” Leclerc explained after the race. “So I was trying to take a bit of a gap to actually push on the tyre.
“But then Xavi told me, I think just before the first corner, that we were fighting Hamilton and so I was too late for being on the limit of the delta.”
After Ferrari struggled with tyre degradation in the opening race weekend in Bahrain, Leclerc said they enjoyed better performance in Saudi Arabia. However he was unhappy with the team’s overall performance.
“There’s much less degradation here. So overall, I think this goes more our way,” he said. “But overall the pace is just not good enough.
“Honestly, there wasn’t much more in the car today. That was the best we could do.”
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Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
19th March 2023, 20:05
Ferrari will never learn. I never understood why they have pitted Leclerc while he was doing a good stint on the soft. Only Perez and Verstappen were faster than him at that point. Alonso in his team radio said that he’ll try to extend which was the right thing to do.
On another note, it’s time for Padros to join Rueda and the rest of the Binotto outcasted team. He’s not suited for the job. Get a new race engineer with great communication skills. There are plenty of them outside of F1.
Todfod (@todfod)
20th March 2023, 6:01
@tifoso1989
I’m the first to criticise Ferraris strategies, but I don’t think they could have anticipated the safety car today. He would have gained some time from the undercut, which seemed like a smart approach at the moment. It’s just the Leclerc curse that repeated itself.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
23rd March 2023, 20:32
@todfod The safety car definitely couldn’t have been predicted; it just highlighted an unfortunate choice to curtail a stint that could and probably should have been extended a little longer to get the most out of the soft tyre (given that the Ferrari really, really does not get on well with the C4 tyre that was the hard). I doubt Ferrari will dwell on it because they would have scored the same number of points as a team either way and there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to Ferrari troubleshooting – but it is a concern.
Jere (@jerejj)
19th March 2023, 20:06
High-ish degradation circuit, low-ish degradation circuit, still nowhere, so I don’t expect things to be much better on the upcoming circuits.
Proesterchen (@proesterchen)
19th March 2023, 20:06
Let’s remember that this weekend was supposed to be better, according to famous seller of second seats to the highest bidder and occasional team figurehead Fred Vasseur.
Sam (@undercut677)
19th March 2023, 20:11
They need to do what Merc is doing and scrap this concept. The initial concept was off and it will never get close to RB. They will finish 4th in the contructors if they keep trying to improve this concept.
MichaelN
19th March 2023, 20:40
This should (almost) never happen in a professional racing team. The fastest car should be moved ahead, so as to maximize any opportunity to capitalize on moments that may occur later in the race. The only reason not to do this is if the leading, but slower, driver is at a crucial stage in the driver title championship fight and needs all the points. And still it’s then worth considering the chance that the other car might do more good by taking points from cars further up ahead.
Even in the WEC where Toyota had no real competition and the title ‘battle’ – such as it was – was always between the two Toyota cars, they never hesitated to move one car over when the other was faster at that point in the race.
Leclerc is doing himself a disservice by not being more forceful about this. Di Montezemolo used to say that Ferrari is more important than any driver, but it seems these days Sainz is considered to be more important than Ferrari.
Ivan B (@njoydesign)
19th March 2023, 21:13
I wholly agree. The very least they could’ve tried is to try to chase Hamilton with leclerc and if that failed revert the positions before the finish. Mind boggling.
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
19th March 2023, 22:28
MichaelN,
Vasseur is being politically correct. He doesn’t want to make radical changes for which he’ll be held accountable for. He’s selling to the media the newcomer story which apparently pushed Vigna himself to intervene. The way Carlos Sainz has bought his way into the team thanks to his social skills and his father influence is unbelievable. He is slow, unreliable, hard on his tyre and rarely on pace.
Let’s not forget how Binotto was badly insisting on Vettel’s n°1 status when Leclerc was the rookie. Leclerc was on pace from the get go and defied that silly team order in Bahrain. I expected him to have the same treatment as Vettel when Sainz arrived but the team was biased towards him. Carlos Sainz is really becoming problematic now for Ferrari. Anyone with a functional brain can notice that. Ferrari immediately should start looking for a replacement.
As for Leclerc, it was rumoured that he has met John Elkann after Bahrain because he wasn’t happy at all. What he can do is to put more pressure on Ferrari in the next contract negotiations to get the n°1 status. He’ll be in a strong position to do since Ferrari don’t have any option apart maybe Hamilton to replace him in 2025.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
19th March 2023, 23:37
Indeed, I don’t like team orders when not warranted, but in general sainz gets preferential treatment at ferrari, a thing I’ve never seen for the slower driver of a team. Leclerc would’ve certainly been able to get more points than sainz did.
MichaelN
19th March 2023, 23:55
@tifoso1989 I’m not sure about that take on Vasseur; the man is a successful manager and businessman and not by any means a ‘company man’. That doesn’t tend to be the kind of person and circumstance that leads to someone being reluctant to making clear decisions. But he’s said before that he wants to take a few race weekends to assess the situation, and really understand how the team works. Some changes that have already been made were so obvious that those apparently got fast-tracked, but I expect more to come by May or so. We’ll see, I guess!
It’s good that Leclerc is talking with The Boss, but he can’t keep coming up through the field and then settling in behind Sainz. I get that it’s harder to pass someone in the same car because the characteristics are so similar, but at some point he’s got to force the issue and pass Sainz. This same scenario (Leclerc starts towards the back, carves through the field, and gets stuck behind Sainz and it’s effectively race over) has now happened multiple times. I like Leclerc, but we all know that’s not something Schumacher would have done.
Agree about Sainz, in Ferrari’s current situation it seems like Leclerc will often default into third but I don’t expect Sainz to keep the car ahead of Alonso, Russell, Hamilton, or even Stroll. Definitely not all of them. There’s work to be done here or him to improve his pace and tyre management. As it is now, it’s not good enough for a Ferrari seat.
Nick T.
20th March 2023, 2:48
Agreed. It was poor decision making by Ferrari, but Leclerc has to STAMP his authority into the team and Sainz’s frog-voiced forehead.
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
20th March 2023, 9:51
MichaelN,
Vasseur has accepted the team principle role. Though he is a General Manager not like Binotto who was the Managing Director. It was already reported that Vigna took a lot of responsibilities from him to prevent a Binotto bis. Leclerc’s race engineer is a joke to say the least. I would say it was a priority to get rid of him even before Rueda.
Replacing Xavi can bring 2 benefits : motivating Leclerc who has had enough and reducing the damage he is currently doing. Vasseur need to intervene immediately with regard to Leclerc’s race engineer, driver’s hierarchy and recruiting a technical director and a chief designer. The only thing he’s done so far is blocking Mekies exit and bringing a new sponsor who was refused by Vigna who told him not to focus on racing.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
23rd March 2023, 20:39
@tifoso1989 Ferrari would have a rather hard time replacing Sainz until the end of 2024 even if it was of a mind to do so (which is not entirely clear, and I can see some value to retaining Sainz), simply due to the contract.
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
24th March 2023, 13:18
@alianora-la-canta
Indeed, Both Leclerc and Sainz are locked till 2024. Though, that doesn’t prevent the team from immediately starting to look for a replacement for Sainz so they will not be caught off guard in 2025 with no valid options.
Phil Norman (@phil-f1-21)
20th March 2023, 0:37
I think this year’s car is really illustrating how average Sainz is. I think he’s always been overrated including by some in prominent positions in the media. Now it’s becoming more obvious.
The team should have moved Sainz out of the way and let Leclerc have a go at Hamilton. I strongly suspect he would have caught him and at least had a battle. Instead Charles was stuck behind Sainz and his tyres which were older, began to fade. Another Ferrari mess up!
Nick T.
20th March 2023, 2:50
Sainz is literally at about Stroll’s level. He has an edge on consistency over stroll and that’s saying very little considering his many, many mistakes last year.
Todfod (@todfod)
20th March 2023, 7:24
@phil-f1-21
If you ask me, last season itself gave us enough information on Sainz’s true capabilities as a driver.
2018 was the first season that Sainz’s stock plummeted. In his first full season with Renault, he was thrashed by Hulkenberg, who is a strong talent, but not a WDC material driver.
In 2021, Sainz couldn’t win a single race on merit. He inherited that British GP win, when Ferrari did their best to work against Leclerc. Sainz also got only one pole position compared to the 8 or 9 that Leclerc managed. Leclerc would have won 5 races on merit that year, as compared to Sainz’s 0. I think that entire season was enough proof that Sainz was just a mediocre #2 driver. He never had the ability to beat championship contending drivers.. and when he’s given a championship contending car, he can’t even win a race on merit.
Sainz is the kind of talent that only shines in a midfield car when racing other midfield drivers. He’s not shown anything in his career to justify a seat in a front running car. Ferrari are notorious for making blunders.. and they need to recognise that Sainz is one of the biggest driver blunders they’ve made in recent history. I would be surprised if they don’t end Sainz’s contract a year earlier than they should.. and try and make a move for Piastri or Norris.
Todfod (@todfod)
20th March 2023, 7:26
*In 2022… sorry
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
20th March 2023, 9:42
@todfod
The mistake of hiring him after a couple of good seasons can be made but what is incredible is that Binotto has pushed for his contract extension in a hurry before even seeing how the 2022 season will unfold and despite having all the data suggesting he was way off Leclerc’s pace in 2021. Norris has stupidly locked himself with McLaren till the end of 2026. Piastri is indeed an interesting prospect and his contract expires at the end of 2024, same as Sainz.
Todfod (@todfod)
20th March 2023, 10:05
@tifoso1989
Were his 2019 and 2020 seasons even that good??
Mclaren was on the up during those two seasons, so their car was reasonably competitive. Sainz was paired against a rookie Norris, who was quicker than a more experienced Sainz from the get go (as shown in their quali record) . Norris lacked experience and racecraft during his rookie year, so he was out scored.
The following season Norris was matching and bettering Sainz pretty regularly, but was far more unlucky with reliability and strategy during that season, which is why he had a lesser points total. But everyone rated Norris more highly than Sainz that season.
If Ferrari had to sign another driver.. Norris should have been their first choice. He was only getting better as Sainz had already peaked and plateued.