Autobayng News Team
Charles Leclerc has revealed he had the wrong idea about the problem with his Ferrari when he complained vociferously to his team during the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The pole-winner led the race during his first and second stints. But after his final pit stop he was unable to catch eventual winner Lando Norris and was passed by Oscar Piastri and George Russell.
Leclerc complained bitterly to his race engineer Bryan Bozzi, claiming the team had failed to pay attention to his feedback about the car.
“This is so incredibly frustrating,” said Leclerc. “We’ve lost all competitiveness.
“You just have to listen to me, I would have found a different way of managing those issues. Now it’s just undriveable. It [will be] a miracle if we finish on the podium.”
However afterwards Leclerc said the team had revealed a problem developed on his car during the race that he wasn’t aware of at the time.
“From around lap 40 we had a problem with the chassis,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “So now I’ve [been given] more details about it, in the car obviously I had no idea what was going on.
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“I had an idea, but it was a wrong idea, because I thought it was something that was in our control. Unfortunately we had an issue on the chassis so I don’t have much to add on that.”
Leclerc scored Ferrari’s first pole position of the season in Hungary but was deeply disappointed after failing to finish on the podium.
“It’s just extremely frustrating when you are fighting for a win, when we had the pace that we had at the beginning of the race and we lose absolutely everything later on,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur said the problem Leclerc was referring to was real but was not the main cause of their loss of performance.
“We were in full control the first stint,” he said, “a bit more under pressure with the McLaren on the second one but we were extending [our lead over] Russell.
“Then in the last part of the race, the last stint, we lost completely the pace of the weekend and finished the race two seconds slower. The car was very difficult to drive for Charles and we need to understand what’s happened.
“But when Charles was speaking about this, it was about tenths of a second and it’s details, but it’s not what’s happened at the end.”
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