Charles Leclerc reflects on podium, as Lewis Hamilton notes of radio chatter and using Leclerc’s set-up + Jerome D’Ambrosio on everything and updates.
After a slightly low-key Friday, Ferrari bounced back well on Saturday, especially after Leclerc finished second in qualifying. His teammate Hamilton backed him up in fourth to set-up a good starting position for Sunday. But the Monegasque immediately lost to Oscar Piastri at the start.
Hamilton too lost to George Russell at Turn 1 but managed to regain it by Turn 6. It was then a steady run by both the drivers as they fell off in the distance from the McLaren F1 pair. The Brit fell off from Leclerc himself, as he faced troubles with the brakes.
At one point, Hamilton urged his team to keep him on one-stop strategy but they forced him to pit. Post-race, the Brit understood the situation and felt it was the right call from Ferrari pitwall. Deputy team principal D’Amrbosio expanded on the race time strategy.
The Belgian stepped in for Frederic Vasseur, who left the team for personal reasons. D’Ambrosio didn’t feel out of place in his first time as a leader without the Frenchman. He noted that he did his own job and praised the team in handling things with the senior personnel.
In terms of the updates, Leclerc, Hamilton and D’Ambrosio felt it was a positive step indeed, even if the step is a small one. The Brit had balance issues still, as he tried Leclerc’s set-up. It is something he had to adapt to sooner than what Carlos Sainz managed when he was at Ferrari.
How race was –
Leclerc: “There weren’t very many key moments on my side. Obviously, the start, I wish I had done a bit of a better job to be completely alongside Lando. Maybe that would have changed a little bit for three or four laps. I don’t think we had the pace to stay there in front. Basically, from Turn 1 one to the end, it was a very boring race. I was on my own, just trying to manage quite a few issues that we had on our side. Let’s not call them issues, but we’ve got to do some management in the situation we’re in at the moment. I won’t go into the detail, but the lift and coast was a little bit frustrating. We paid a bit of the price for it on the first stint, but then the second and last stint were a bit more positive, which was good. But there weren’t many key moments apart from the start.
“We changed quite a lot of things on the car. Obviously, I missed FP1, so FP2 was all about trying to understand where we were. Then for FP3, we did a big change in order to re-centre ourselves. I think we did a really good job from Friday to Saturday, only with one session to be able to re-centre ourselves. As soon as I got into the car in FP3, the car was feeling a lot better. I didn’t do the long runs with the setup of today, but there weren’t any bad surprises as well. I think we did a good job by maximising the car potential this weekend.”
Hamilton: “Great start, and had a great battle with George from Turn 1 all the way through to Turn 6, and managed to hold on to the outside, which is awesome. After that, the car didn’t feel too bad. I was able to hold on for a second, but then I was really struggling with the balance. We have brake issues, so having to manage these brakes really early on, which is losing, definitely, some time. That’s something I’m really pushing to get fixed, because that’s not great. Then, just balance. I was really struggling just with balance.”
D’Ambrosio: “I think it is difficult to know what others are doing and why they are performing or not performing, I think we can only focus on ourselves. Looking at our weekend, from Friday we put it together, we maximised what we had. We did bring a package on track which did what it was supposed to do, which is always a good start. It was an important point. How much of that changes the whole result or not versus putting it all together and maximising what you have at hand is always difficult to say but we did that. We had a pretty strong qualifying and we put it together compared to what we have done in last few races and obviously you gain on Saturday, Sunday gets easier as well.
“I tend not to go into races with too much expectations one way or the other. I think this year is really important if you look at the best example is if you saw Mercedes last weekend to this weekend, a small thing makes a big difference, what we got to do is to focus on optimisation in what we have and focus on optimisation on bring better tomorrow than we are today. Then the result is the result, we cannot affect that, we can only affect the process. This is what we are trying to do at the track in the background and hopefully that is what is going to move us forward. But I agree with you, clearly McLaren had a very strong pace in the race.”
Updates worked or not –
Leclerc: “They are definitely a step forward. Yes. And I think it helped us to be on the podium today. The team has done an incredible job at pushing to try and get them as early as possible. I know that they are still pushing extremely hard to have other upgrades as soon as possible, which I hope will make another difference and will help us to be a bit closer to McLaren, to Red Bull in their good days, or to Mercedes even in their good days. So, yeah, we are pushing hard, and I hope that we see the result as soon as possible.”
Hamilton: “I think we have move forwards. The upgrade was quite small, so we didn’t really know… they didn’t even mention any time, because it was that small. Perhaps there was a bigger result from putting the floor on, so that’s a real positive; really great to see the team bringing the upgrade and moving us forward. Being the second fastest [team] this weekend, getting fourth is a real positive, so there’s lots of good things to take from the weekend and there’s lots of areas to focus on. I think qualifying was better, we found the problem that I had which ruined my last qualifying lap, cost me a tenth due to some issue on the car. So that’s again a positive because I was only…but I would have gone backwards if I started second anyways. We got to find race pace, that’s the key.”
D’Ambrosio: “The feedback is that it basically delivered what it was suppose to deliver which is important and it is a step forward. The floor is an evolution of the current philosophy, there was no drastic change in approach or philosophy on the car, it was just adding a bit of downforce and that’s what we did.”
Trying set-up of Leclerc –
Hamilton: “Still losing massive ground. We lose eight seconds, nine seconds to Charles is not good enough. Set-up even closer to Charles, yeah. Just struggling with the balance, he drives a massively oversteering car. Somehow slides the rear, so it doesn’t have degradation. When I slide the rear, I get massive degradation. It’s definitely something I think you have to get used to. Supposedly, it took Carlos a couple of years to get used to. I don’t want to do that. I think as I said, there was improvement in quali, just didn’t have the race pace.”
Strategy call –
Hamilton: “I didn’t know how many laps we had at that time. Honestly, the pace wasn’t looking great but I thought I could keep going, the balance was okay, but it wouldn’t have made any difference, the team’s decision was right.”
D’Ambrosio: “No, I think it was more question of a matter of setting, so staying a few more laps. In the end, it’s nothing out of the norm. What we try to do as a team was to, and Austria is very much like that, you try to do your optimal strategy. You try to optimise your race time. That’s what we did with both drivers. To be honest there was no incentive in doing anything different, because the McLarens were clearly far ahead and George quite far behind. So we were in between them with both cars. We just did a standard optimal strategy, and that was the most straightforward thing to do. From a driver’s perspective, you question always, is it the best? Can we do something else? They are racers, they’re Formula 1 drivers, that’s what they should do, and that’s what they do. But in the end, you look at the numbers and that’s what made sense.
Filling for Frederic Vasseur –
D’Ambrosio: “I don’t think I made my debut as team principal, I did my role as deputy and as part of it, if something like that happens…Fred had to leave and then I stepped in. Obviously, it went well because we have strong team, we have good people in the background, we have strong engineering team, a strong mechanics team, who did a great job. So it was pretty straightforward from that perspective. Now at the factory and at the races, I speak to Fred 20 times a day, we are aligned, so it is not something that I was dropped into something like a fish out of water. I have been to many races this year, been among the pitwall with the team, in the end we didn’t deviate too much from what we do.
“I’ve been in the team now since October and Lewis has been in the team since January so we’ve had a lot of discussions, how can one improve? And this is what we do. We wake up, we go to the factory and say, how can I improve? How can we be better in every area of the team, from engineering to execution on the track, to what feedback we can give to the drivers. How can we help one another as a team to move forward? And that’s true in every single area of the team. So when he came with Lewis, we for sure we discussed all of that, and we discussed in the same way with Charles, who also has extensive experience and we discussed as a team. We have regular meetings to discuss these things on how to best move forward.”
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-austrian-grand-prix-norris-leads-as-verstappen-is-knocked-out-on-the-race-start.1836270947058772854
Here’s how F1 Austrian GP panned out
