Charles Leclerc Making the Ferrari F1 Car Look Better Than It Really Is
While Mercedes domination continues to be the talk in Formula 1 in 2020, one man who has been doing a very impressive job, albeit rather under the radar, is Scuderia Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
It hasn’t been a perfect job because Leclerc did take out his teammate Sebastian Vettel on the first lap in the Styrian Grand Prix. He did, however, admit his mistake straight away and did not try to pretend that it was not his fault.
“Obviously excuses are not enough in times like this,” Leclerc said two weeks ago, following the Styrian Grand Prix in Austria. “I am just disappointed in myself. I’ve done a very bad job today. I let the team down. I can only be sorry, even though I know it’s not enough. I hope I will learn from this and we will come back stronger for the next races.”
In Hungary, Leclerc found his Ferrari SF1000 to be much worse in the race than it had been in qualifying and he ended up 11th, perplexed by the behavior of the car.
“I think there was something wrong,” Leclerc said. “It just doesn’t match with the car I had in qualifying, but also the day before on Friday, and we haven’t changed much. It was extremely hard to drive. It just didn’t feel like the same car.”
In Austria, however, in the opening race of the season, Leclerc made the Ferrari look half-decent when it was already clear that it is a very average racing car, with an uncompetitive engine. He qualified only seventh—Teammate Sebastian Vettel was 11th—but astonished everyone, not least himself, by driving the car to second.
“I did not expect it!” Leclerd said afterwards. “I think we did everything perfectly today. We had a bit of luck with Lewis’s penalty and some crashes, but that was the goal—to take every opportunity.
“But we are still very far away,” he added.
In Silverstone on Sunday, no one was expecting anything exceptional from Ferrari, but Leclerc somehow managed to qualify fourth fastest, even if his best lap was 1.12 secs off race-winner Lewis Hamilton’s pole position. However Leclerc did that using medium tyres, while Vettel could only qualify 10th, using the softer rubber.
“It was a much better qualifyng than we had hoped for,” Leclerc said. “I am very, very happy with the job we have done and with my final lap, where I think I got everything together and the car was feeling pretty good in terms of balance. I don’t think there was anything more to extract from the car.”
In the race, Leclerc never had a hope of keeping up with his faster rivals, but once again he grabbed every opportunity that came his way and fought hard, despite considerable pressure from Carlos Sainz’s McLaren. He was surprised in the final laps as some of his rivals suffered tire failures and he surprised to once again find himself on the podium.
“It was a good race,” Leclerc said. “I was very happy with the balance of the car and how I managed the tires. And as soon as I heard about Valtteri’s (Bottas) tire I slowed quite a lot. Then Carlos’s failed two laps later, and Lewis’s on the last lap… I’m surprised to be third, but today we took all the opportunities that came our way, so I’m very happy.”
This meant that after the British GP, Leclerc sits fifth in the Drivers’ Championship, with 33 points, in a car that one could argue is probably only the fifth fastest on the grid, behind the Mercedes, the Red Bull, the Racing Point and the McLaren. And Renault is pretty close.
In total, Ferrari has scored only 43 points, while Mercedes has racked up 146.
A few days ago Ferrari chairman John Elkann admitted that he does not expect the team to be competitive until at least the 2022 Formula 1 season. This is because the engines are now frozen with only one development step allowed each season.
There was a nominal reshuffle of engineers at Ferrari after Hungary, but the company is trying hard to avoid the traditional sense of crisis that would normally lead Ferrari into a change of management in such circumstances. This is wise thinking, but one does need to ask the question as to how Ferrari got itself into this mess.
Mattia Binotto took over the team management in January 2019, so it was clearly under his watch that the Ferrari power unit suddenly became the most powerful in F1 and then dropped back dramatically when the FIA tightened the rules related to fuel flow meters. Elkann says that the company has “full trust” in Binotto and says that “we are laying the oundations for being competitive and returning to winning.” He also says that he believes that Binotto “has the characteristics and skills to start a new winning cycle."
Perhaps he does, but Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, who is usually a very diplomatic fellow, has clearly lost patience with Binotto. The two had a very close relationship last year but in recently Wolff publicly stated that Binotto’s explanations about why the Ferrari has lost its speed are “bullshit."
Clearly that bromance is over.
For the moment, however, Charles Leclerc is doing his best to take the heat off the Ferrari management, which means that their faces are not as red as perhaps they should be.
