24/04/2024
NEWS STORY
Charles Leclerc admits to not understanding why he lost so much pace once he switched to the hard compound during today's Grand Prix.
Despite a VSC and two full Safety Cars, the Monegasque finished 23s down on the world champion, and even Lando Norris admitted to having bet that he would not be able to match the Ferraris for 
pace.
Having enjoyed some argy bargy during the Sprint, Leclerc and his teammate were at it again this afternoon, both drivers losing out to George Russell as they scrapped in the opening corner.
Like Norris, Leclerc extended his opening stint, and indeed ran second to the McLaren when Max Verstappen made his first stop of the day.
However, once he finally pitted and switched to hard the Monegasque's pace appeared to fall away, leaving him unable to defend against Sergio Perez.
"I don't think we found it as a team, especially on the hard tyres, which is a bit strange because the strength of this car since the beginning of the year is it's very solid in all conditions with all tyres," he said, when asked why his pace had dropped so alarmingly.
"Today is a bit of an outlier," he added, "because as soon as we put on the hards, we were half a second off. So that is very strange. We will look into it and try to understand what went wrong on that run."
Leclerc made his sole stop a lap before Norris, who also switched to hards, and the Ferrari driver fully expected to be battling him.
"It's very strange," he said, "especially compared with the McLaren. With Lando at first, I really thought we were going to fight with him. I was doing good tyre management until the safety car that reset it a little bit, all strategies, which is a bit of a shame because I think we were doing a good job, and then, on the hard, we were just slow.
"We were expecting this weekend to be very similar or in line with whatever we've seen since the beginning of the season, but we were struggling quite a bit more."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Shanghai here.