Charles Leclerc’s 80-point deficit over Max Verstappen, with nine Grands Prix remaining in the 2022 Formula 1 season, seems like an almost impossible mountain to climb, even more so considering that Ferrari keeps losing points, whether due to driver error, reliability issues or, as appears to have been the case in Hungary, questionable strategic decisions.
For the Monegasque, the race was decided when the Red Bull driver, who was then in fourth position, stopped to set up a second set of midfielders. The Dutchman came out with the soft compound, while the Ferrari driver had done so with the Pirelli yellows.
Instead of lengthening their stint with mediums in order to finish the race on soft tyres, the Maranello team opted to cover Verstappen’s plan , but the only realistic option was hard tyres.
However, from the get-go they proved to be less than ideal tyres, and not only did the Dutchman do his job to overtake Leclerc once he left the pits a lap later, but even when the championship leader spun on the penultimate corner shortly after, it was not long before he overtook his main rival again.
The pace of the Monegasque was so catastrophic that Ferrari preferred to send him to the pitlane again to put another soft compound with about fifteen laps to go, so he could not go beyond the sixth final position that seemed like a debacle after seeing the square from the one they ripped off.
As the weeks go by, Leclerc struggles to understand this situation: “I don’t have an explanation [for the choice of soft tires in the third stint] at the moment, I don’t really know what to say either,” he told Canal+ . “We’ll have to look at it again, but right now it’s tough.”
“The mids were very good, we were quite fast with them. They were still pretty good, I was confident and I said it on the radio, but we decided to cover Max [Verstappen] with the hard while he was running the mids, and that ended in carnage. “said the man from Monaco.
“We stopped five or six laps later to put on other soft tyres, so it was a long stint. Anyway, I don’t have too many answers at the moment,” he said.
Asked if starting with midfielders was a doom for the team, Leclerc disagreed: “I think the start has nothing to do with it, it was the right strategy at the beginning, but I also tried to go as far as possible with these second midfielders, which They were good tires, I had a good feeling with them, I don’t understand it”.
On the gap that now separates him from Verstappen in the drivers’ championship, he added: “You go race by race, but honestly after a while you can’t expect to win the championship if you keep racing like this, so I don’t really know. what to say. Hopefully the second part of the season smiles a little more on us, but we have to improve.”
