Charles Leclerc’s struggles continued at the British Grand Prix this past weekend. During the race at Silverstone, he suffered his second Q2 exit before finishing outside the points on Sunday. Despite his poor performance in Britain, Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur does not believe the Monegasque could have performed much better. As quoted by Pit Debrief, Vasseur said,
“We have to avoid trying to draw a generic conclusion on what’s happened. We need to have a deep look at everything. I think the car in the last two races was, at least, not easy to drive. It was asking a lot of the drivers, and mainly from Charles. He had the new package on Friday. We didn’t do the FP3 with the wet [conditions], and he had to go in quali with a car that he didn’t drive before“.
Listen to the disappointing team radio message of Charles as he failed to make the top 10 qualifying ⤵️https://t.co/bHaRIPHLIz
— Scuderia Fans (@ScuderiaFansF1) July 6, 2024
Leclerc did indeed suffer far more than his Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz at the British Grand Prix. While Sainz managed to finish an outstanding fifth, the Monegasque only managed 14th.
Despite Leclerc failing to score a point, Vasseur chose to blame the car and not the 26-year-old. However, while Leclerc may not have been at fault at Silverstone, the same cannot be said about Ferrari’s strategy team.
Ferrari made another strategic blunder with Leclerc
For the most part of 2024, it seemed that Ferrari had put its strategic blunders behind them. However, the 2024 British GP proved that they have not overcome this concern completely.
The Italian team went for an aggressive move with Leclerc which failed miserably. Ferrari opted for the intermediate tries on the Monegasque’s SF24 eight laps earlier than when the rain arrived. As a result, this move completely ruined his race.
He confessed the same to the media as well as he said, “Yes, we did [take the wrong call]. We went with an aggressive strategy which definitely didn’t pay off. I was told the rain was coming very hard the lap after, which only came eight laps later and we destroyed the [intermediate tires] in the meantime“.
“yes, we did (wrong call). we went with an agressive strategy which definitely didn’t pay off. i was told the rain was coming very hard the lap after, which only came 8 laps later and we destroyed the inters in the meantime…” https://t.co/dtl2pHOoO9
— clara (@leclercsletters) July 7, 2024
Despite starting from P11, there was hope that he could score a few points. However, Ferrari’s wrong call made his race go from bad to worse.
In fact, this call resulted in Leclerc getting lapped by most of the frontrunners. Therefore, since Ferrari made yet another strategic error at Silverstone, they need to ensure that they get on top of these issues as soon as possible to prevent them from losing more opportunities when they can score points.
