The facts are stubborn, the figures cruel. Charles Leclerc missed the opportunity to win for the tenth time in a row by starting from pole position on Sunday in Austin. Author of 21 career peak positions since 2019, the Monegasque has only won four times from the most popular location on the grid, the last in Melbourne, on April 10, 2022.
We know that the pilot of the Principality is not the type to go into contact in close combat. He learned from certain mistakes at the start of his career, the others know this only too well and play on it. Just Saturday, he was cornered by Max Verstappen (Red Bull) at the start of the sprint. “I would’ve done the same thing”, he whispered. Not sure…
On Sunday, he was in pole position for the United States Grand Prix and history stuttered. There wasn’t even a duel: he got off to a bad start and Lando Norris (McLaren) slipped past him. Later, Max Verstappen (Red Bull) overtook him without leaving him any room at turn 12. But it was not reprehensible according to the FIA commissioners.
“Not the car to convert on Sunday”
Questioned by Canal+ at the end of a race spoiled by a one-stop plan, he expressed his weariness at the media treatment he has received for months. “We should stop with this statistic because I do a very good job on Saturdayshe cut. It always turns out to be a negative statistic. In the race, unfortunately we can’t convert, but today I don’t have the car to convert on Sunday. I hope one day I get it and I hope to one day change that statistic. For now, I’m very happy with the performances we have on Saturday. Afterwards, in (pneumatic) degradation, we are clearly less good than the others. There’s a lot of work to do on that.”
It’s true, he initially often suffered from excessive wear of his tires, and he remains a Saturday man more than a Sunday man. Exactly what George Russell was accused of in the not-so-distant past.
“I would have liked it to be resolved on the track”
However, he faced other pitfalls, suffering another unbearable handicap on Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas. He was the only one to stop once in a peloton where two stops was the obvious norm. But not for Ferrari… “The figures we had before the race told us that it was very close in one or two stopshe pleaded at the microphone of Canal+. Clearly it wasn’t because everyone made two stops except us. We have to look, understand where we made a mistake. We lost a lot of points, it hurts…”
“We had a bad reading of the race beforerecognized Frédéric Vasseur, the team director. We were a bit between the two: we took two stops for Carlos, I think it was the right strategy. a stop with Charles was not. Charles did a pretty good job: he saved what furniture and points we could with this strategy. Carlos starts P4, he does P4, he does the job, we do the job. It’s going pretty well. We had a rather difficult start to the race, the last two thirds of the race were rather better than Norris. The subject is that Charles starts in pole position and we have the one-stop strategy which is not the right one.
“The driver does not have the complete vision of the race”
To make matters worse, “Charlot” let a certain bitterness show around fifteen laps from the end, when the Scuderia asked him to stop blocking his teammate. “Why should I let him pass? We’ll talk about it after the race”he protested. “My perspective has changedhe corrected upon arrival. I asked for explanations afterwards, and I was told that Pérez came in behind, with a good performance too. It was understandable that we shouldn’t fight with Carlos because he couldn’t lose a place too. I understand. I thought Carlos was alone in the world. I would have liked it to be resolved on the track but I understand the choice after understanding the situation.”
“The problem is that the driver does not have the complete vision of the race: the position of the others, the speed of the others… At one point, Charles was frustrated by thatpleaded his boss, Fred Vasseur. But when he understood that Russell or Pérez was coming behind, he understood what was being asked of him and he did it quite well.” But that was before the hiccup of disqualification for excessive wear of the pads located under the floor of the SF23 n°16. A double-sided weekend for the unfortunate Monegasque. Right side up in testing, upside down in racing…