Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton reflect on Ferrari disqualification in China, as the former adds on F1 title scene and the latter rubbishes faith loss chatter.
Both the Ferrari drivers felt hurt, but are not entirely frustrated after the disqualification in F1 Chinese GP, due to two different reasons. Leclerc was underweight, while Hamilton had his skid-block worn out. The team analysed the shortcoming in the mini break.
It was not too deep in the end. Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur noted about small factors on the side of Leclerc leading to the car being underweight, like drinking water leak and worn tyres after switch to one-stop. At the same time, the ride height on Hamilton’s car was also not changed too much after the sprint per se.
Vasseur stressed that every team pushes itself to the limit and sometimes, it just so happens that they go beyond the threshold they can control. Hamilton backed the Frenchman in terms of learning from the shortcoming. His mindset is not about disqualification, but more about learning the process that Ferrari has.
It is all in the set-up he feels – which he is not yet 100% – especially whether tweaks are needed or not. In hindsight, he feels if Ferrari had kept the Saturday set-up, things may have been different on Sunday for him. But so far, he is not dictating terms as much as he did at Mercedes, due to lack of experience.
He rubbished the ‘lack of faith’ chatter as well which surfaced after China. He was surprised by Leclerc’s pace with the front wing damage, though. It did surprise the Monegasque as well, but he doesn’t want that to happen often. He feels the sprint performance was all on Hamilton, who made the difference.
At the moment, he is not thinking too far ahead about the title scenario for Ferrari, whether drivers’ or teams’. He notes that the Italian F1 outfit is ahead in performance curve this year when compared to the same time last year, where they were trailing behind Red Bull, whom they managed to beat.
Disqualification –
Leclerc: “I’m confident because whenever you make mistakes, you learn from them, especially when they cost that much. Everybody plays with the limit and tries to be as close as possible to it. But to have both cars underneath it was a big pain. We didn’t need that. It’s been a very difficult first part of the season. The first two races were difficult, the pace was not where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, it hurts the team a lot. I’m confident we’ve learned from it. Whenever these kind of events happen we try to understand and analyse what went wrong and change a little bit the process. It was a multitude of things adding up, and the margin we took wasn’t big enough.”
Hamilton: “I didn’t feel like any frustration or anything afterwards. It is what it is. Of course, we’ve gone through everything. I was at the factory on Wednesday and [there are] lots of learnings, we take the highs and lows together as a team. Obviously, it’s not what everyone’s worked hard to have happen on a race weekend, no team, no engineer, no mechanic puts all the effort in for something like that. I’d say the most impressive thing is how the team have taken it, how they’ve worked, how they turned through the data, and how we progress from here is most important. Firstly, in the race you drive around, you drive away from the bumps, so I was avoiding all the bumps in certain areas like Turn 13 for example and I couldn’t feel the car, it wasn’t bottoming, it wasn’t bouncing, so was not made aware in that respect. We knew it was a one-stop race, I ended up doing two and also I had not driven that tyre how hard we got, pretty much all the drivers around me had driven that tyre.”
Difficult start, title scene –
Leclerc: “It’s as difficult as always. It’s always tricky to extract the maximum. I don’t think it’s harder this season – it’s just the performance compared to McLaren is just not good enough. It’s not about extracting the performance – it’s just that there isn’t enough of it for now. But step by step, I’m sure and confident we can close that gap, starting from this weekend hopefully. If we go back to last year, looking at the first few races, the situation in terms of performance was quite a bit worse than where we are now. We kind of expected Red Bull to dominate the whole season, and by taking the points that were available at the beginning of the season with the performance we had, we ended up actually fighting for the championship – which was way above our expectations. There’s definitely not that feeling within the team at the moment. However, we do feel we haven’t maximized what we could have in the first two races, and that’s frustrating. But it doesn’t mean we cannot recover. The season is still very long. Small steps after small steps – we can still have an amazing season.”
Pace up and down –
Leclerc: “I won’t go into very specific details. I think we’re starting to understand the car and have some ideas where we’re lacking. In Australia, it was well understood. In China, Lewis did an outstanding job on Friday – maybe some drivers didn’t put everything together in qualifying and he managed to do that and managed to outperform the car a bit. Then tyre degradation being a big thing. When you start in front, everything comes to you a bit more. But I think Lewis made a difference on Friday and Saturday, which in the second qualifying – everyone was more up to pace – we saw more of the real pace of the car.
“I think, very similar to last year, we have a good car in terms of race pace, but we couldn’t really show it until now. Whenever you start in the middle of the pack, degradation is worse, and you can’t really show your real pace. That’s what happened a bit on Sunday in China. So I think the pace is still as good as what we saw Saturday with Lewis. However, we can’t use it if we don’t have better qualifying pace. So if I take a step back that’s where we need to improve – qualifying. It was the case last year, and this year it seems even more so.”
Hamilton: “It’s a combination of probably several different things, but I think mostly just pinning the set-up. I told you that I’m still learning about this car, so I still haven’t tested every item that they have yet. Ultimately, I made the wrong decision on set-up for the Saturday going into qualifying at the last race, which then I just had to live with for the race. If we had just left the car probably alone or actually [if] the step that we did take [had been] an improvement, I think we could have qualified in the top three, which would then have had a much different result, most likely.
“But that wasn’t the case, and it was really difficult to drive from the moment we went out in qualifying and then it was the same balance on a Sunday, so we just had to persevere with it. There is general lack of understanding on what we out there. I think that outside of that garage most people completely underestimate what we actually do. When we’re talking about set-up and changes that we’re making, all the different graphs that you’re looking at for aero, through-corner balance, mechanical balance, roll balance, all these different things that we’re trying to play with and finesse through a weekend.
“After analysing the last two races, the first race I generally didn’t feel great in the car at the beginning, but our pace wasn’t too bad on the first two days; Sunday was the first time I’d ever driven the car in the rain, and I was learning a lot throughout the race. Then in the last race, that was the first time I’d actually done a long run. Every other driver here pretty much got to do the Abu Dhabi test and try the 2025 tyre. I didn’t. And we went into the race run in Bahrain and the car broke down. The sprint race was the first time I’d actually done a 20-lap stint and then in the race it was the first time I’d ever tried the C2, so I was just learning that through a race. I was definitely starting to feel the onwards effect of not being able to do the test at the end of the year, and so on reflection I’m quite happy how I’ve adapted in just those two races. But I’ve definitely got a lot of work to do to make sure that it’s better moving forward.”
Front wing –
Leclerc: “I can assure you it’s never a good thing to have a broken front wing, so it’s not something I want to target for the rest of the year. There were some interesting things we looked at to understand where the performance was coming from. I believe the performance was really strong in terms of race pace. I made some changes already on Saturday – it was strong, especially at the end of the stint considering I was in traffic. Then we made some changes and took a step forward for Sunday’s race. So I think the overall pace was very strong. I believe it would have been stronger with a full front wing, but by changing the tools and adapting the driving, it didn’t have as much influence as we thought. But it’s still faster to have a full front wing.”
Hamilton: “What was interesting was the improved balance that Charles had with the damage to his car, it was fascinating to see that there was a big improvement to say the least.”
Faith question –
Hamilton: “I saw someone sent me something of whether or not I’m losing faith in the team, which is completely rubbish. I have absolute 100 per cent faith in this team. I think there was obviously a huge amount of hype at the beginning of the year, and I don’t know if anyone was expecting us to be winning from race one and winning a championship in our first year. That wasn’t my expectation. I know that I’m coming into a new culture, a new team, and it’s going to take time. I’ve spent the past two months just observing how the team works in comparison to the other two teams that I’ve worked at. And through this past week, I’ve been able to make notes and create pointers of areas that I feel that we can improve on, and that will continue through the year as we learn more and more about each other.”
Here’s Frederic Vasseur on media reporting on radio chats
Here’s news on Dino Beganovic getting FP1 drive
Here’s Frederic Vasseur and drivers on Chinese GP
Here’s information on Ferrari DQ
