George Russell suspects Charles Leclerc lost pace at the end of the Hungarian Grand Prix because Ferrari were concerned about plank wear on his car.
The Mercedes driver passed Leclerc for third place towards the end of the race. “I saw how slow he was, so I presumed something was not right,” he told Sky.
Leclerc ran strongly early on in the race after taking pole position. He led during his first and second stints but dropped back in the third.
Russell suspects Ferrari were concerned the about potentially excessive wear on the legality plank on the underside of Leclerc’s car. He said they may have increased his tyre pressure when he made his final pit stop on lap 41.
Doing so would raise the car and reduce tyre wear but also negatively affect the car’s handling. Afterwards Leclerc said he had a problem with his car’s chassis from around lap 40.
“He’s not going to tell you that they’re close to being illegal,” Russell said.
“The only thing we can think of is they were running the car too low to the ground and they had to increase the tyre pressures for the last stint,” he said. Russell said when he caught Leclerc he noticed Ferrari “were using an engine mode that was making the engine slower at the end of the straight, which is where you have the most amount of plank wear.”
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“That’s the only thing we can think of based upon the lap times and the engine mode they were running and stuff like that,” he added.
Russell said he was “really pleased” to score his first podium finish since he won the Canadian Grand Prix in June. However he admitted it had been “a strange weekend” for performance across the field.
“If you exclude McLaren and you look at the order of P3 to P13, it’s quite odd. You wouldn’t expect Max [Verstappen] to be so far down. Aston had an amazing weekend. So we’ll take the positives and we won’t get carried away with it.”
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