BUDAPEST, Hungary – Ferrari must get better in every area after the team misguidedly overcame the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Ferrari’s record for poor strategy calls continued on Sunday as Leclerc went from race lead to finish 16 seconds behind Max Verstappen, who looks set to end this year’s championship with a number of backup races.
The strategy Ferrari chose is not among the four fastest projected strategies that Formula One tire supplier Pirelli outlined ahead of the race.
Leclerc’s second stop saw Ferrari fit the car’s toughest Pirelli tyres despite the fact Kevin Magnussen and both Alpine drivers struggled with the same compound throughout the race.
Leclerc wanted to stay in the middle position and eventually switched to soft tyres.
“I have made it clear that the means [tyre] I wanted to keep it for as long as possible, but we were pitted very early for the hard part, which we need to understand why,” Leclerc said after the race.
Leclerc’s championship-challenging hopes have gone up in smoke this year due to a combination of Ferrari’s strategic blunders, reliability issues and two of his own at Imola and Paul Ricard. .
Asked if it’s frustrating to see another race slip away, he said: “Obviously, a race like this is very frustrating. And there needs to be improvement as a whole.
“You know, it always feels like there’s always something going on, no matter what, reliability, mistakes, whatever. But we need better to spend a weekend together. And yes, we will try to use the few days where we have to reset , but obviously also have to analyze and understand where we need to be better, and what we can do to be good. more, because this is extremely important.”
Ferrari looked comfortably fastest on Friday practice but had no apparent speed advantage on Sunday, when temperatures had cooled considerably.
Leclerc’s teammate Carlos Sainz pointed that out in post-race interviews.
“I think we lacked pace and I don’t think we made that many mistakes either. I think when you lack speed like Red Bull did in Austria, nobody says ‘Red Bull can be’. keep making these mistakes?” No. I think we had a really bad pace today. “
He added: “We need to analyze how we can go on Friday from people being half a second clear on race speed, and pushing flat tires more suddenly with low track temperatures. over 30 degrees, and there’s not that speed advantage. To me, it’s clearly something about speed that’s far from us at these temperatures.”
