11/07/2024
NEWS STORY
Charles Leclerc will be happy to see the back of the triple-header after enduring another nightmare race.
Since his popular win in Monaco, the Ferrari driver has had a torrid time. Retiring from the Canadian Grand Prix with an engine issue, a fifth in Spain was followed by the Austrian and Silverstone weekend, both of which were point less. As a result, the youngster has slipped behind Lando Norris in the championship, and is now under threat from teammate Carlos Sainz.
Qualifying eleventh on Saturday, come the race Leclerc ran as high as seventh, however the decision to pit him as early as Lap 19 for Inters proved disastrous for the rain wasn't nearly heavy enough to make the switch, consequently just 8 laps later he had to make a second stop for more of the green-banded tyres.
Following his third stop he rejoined in 15th, passing Valtteri Bottas for 14th just a few laps from the end.
"It's very hard, very hard," he told reporters at race end, "I don't really have the words to explain it, but it's been four races that have been worse than a nightmare, so I hope we can come back soon.
"It's very difficult to look at positives on days like this," he admitted, "I just want to go back with the team, analyse the ways we are making decisions, and why we were on the wrong side today.
"The call was clearly the wrong one," he added, "I'll look back into it. With the message I got and the info I had it felt like it was the right one. It was raining a lot, I was told the rain was going to be heavy so I stopped to anticipate, but the rain came eight, nine laps later, so that was obviously the end of our race.
"It's very frustrating, another weekend to forget and it starts to be a lot."
With the recent upgrade appearing to have taken the Maranello outfit in the wrong direction, the team has been left to experiment with set-up and strategies, splitting them between Leclerc and his teammate.
"The upgrades brought us the numbers that we were expecting but also brought us quite a lot of bouncing in the high-speed," said Leclerc. "For a track like this we decided that it was probably better having a bit less performance but having more consistency, and I think that was the right choice.
"Going forward, we'll analyse all the data we had until now with the two packages and try to understand if there's anything we haven't understood yet. The bouncing was better, so the consistency was better."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Silverstone here.