Charles Leclerc didn’t expect a podium in F1 Belgian GP but dry gamble worked after managing to hold off Max Verstappen, as Frederic Vasseur adds on updates.
After sprint qualifying, Ferrari’s Leclerc wasn’t feeling as good since both the McLaren cars along with Red Bull’s Verstappen seemed a bit far in F1 Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps. It proved to be the case in the sprint after he was unable to make much inroads in the race.
He passed Lando Norris but after he was re-passed, there was nothing he could do. In qualifying, the compromised settings for Verstappen allowed Leclerc to secure third. A mixed run in the grand prix further helped the Monegasque to keep the Dutchman at bay for long.
Verstappen tried hard to hustle him at the start when the conditions were tricky, but couldn’t get through. Even though the gap was always around two seconds, Leclerc secured an unexpected podium. “It’s nice, I don’t think we expected it, especially after the Sprint Qualifying when I saw the gap with the top three,” said the Ferrari driver.
“I was like, okay, it’s going to be probably the best we can do this weekend. Yesterday, we did a really good lap. We did take a little bit of a gamble with the lower downforce compared to people around us, and then the rain today was tricky. The first part of the race was very difficult and Max definitely was faster than me. I had to keep him behind there, which we did.
“Once we went on the slicks, things came a bit more towards me. I just knew I had to do the job and P3 could be ours, which at the end it is, and I’m very happy. In the wet, probably [I was worried he would overtake me]. He was very, very close to me, but he never actually made it, which is great. The gap was always exactly the same.
“Sometimes I was doing a really good lap, and then I would look at the gap and he would do exactly the same lap. I was like, fuck, okay, so I just need to keep that pace now. Until the very end, he was very close to me. At the beginning of the race, I think it would have been very unlikely that we would stand on the podium if it was a full wet race, especially with the amount of downforce we had.
“It was very difficult to actually make those tyres work. Luckily for us, it dried up pretty quickly, and then the car became nice again to drive. Before that, it was difficult. I also had that in mind yesterday in qualifying and probably didn’t go as extreme as I normally used to in terms of setup for the dry, which also probably helped for the first part of the race,” summed up Leclerc.
On strategy side, team boss Vasseur didn’t think they could have gambled on the hard tyre. There was lack of running and no one was initially certain about its performance levels. With the medium, there was a chance to gamble with potential one-stop, if the tyre hung on.
It did, even though, they started to struggle a bit by the end of it. The downforce choice was a gamble too on the side of Leclerc. “No, I think that the deg was not that huge,” said Vasseur to media. “When we are in this kind of weekend, don’t forget that we had the C1, C3 this weekend, it’s not so often that you have this gap. And you didn’t long stint at all the C3 or the C1.
“We long stinted the medium yesterday, but not the hard. It was not obvious for us to be able to do one stint with the medium. And perhaps Lando took the bet to go for one stint with hard. But Piastri, I think, was also on the edge. The first part of the stint, he said, ‘okay, I don’t know if I will have to pit again or not’. And we were in the same situation.
“For Charles, honestly I don’t know, because then we are speaking about 2-3 kph between us, Max and the McLarens. When you make the choice on Saturday at 2pm, you have no clue about how many laps you will do on Sunday with the tyre. For sure it’s a kind of gamble, but I think it was the right call. I’m not sure that in the top 3-4 it would’ve made a huge difference if we had one step more or less.
“At the end of the day, it was not that obvious that today it would be 100% wet. You saw the race and it wasn’t full wet. We had this kind of forecast saying that, okay, you will have tonnes of showers all day, but we also had the advantage to [analyse the situation]. We knew yesterday the situation for the quali and we knew also that in case of rain, then you also have the spray, it’s difficult to overtake, and so on.
“But it was a choice, not an easy one, and it was a bit 50-50 on the grid. It’s always a kind of bet, because even in the morning [when] I spoke with some of you, I was not expecting that we’ll have the sun in the afternoon,” summed up Vasseur, who defended the call to bring the updates in a sprint F1 weekend. Any running is better than none and now they have a baseline.
“I think that we have to fine-tune the situation,” he said. “It’s never easy to introduce something on a Sprint weekend, but we didn’t want to postpone to Budapest. It’s true that with the format of the weekend, the fact that you don’t long stint on Friday, or doing a long stint of four laps, it’s not easy to have references and so on.
“But at the end, I think it was the right call because it’s also the best preparation for us for next week. We will try to put everything together a bit earlier into the weekend to be a bit more performant next week.”
Leclerc added: “I’m pleased with the steps forward we are doing, and I think we should all be proud about that because I know that behind that, there’s a lot of work behind the scenes from the people back at home for us to have this upgrade here. It definitely helped us to get the podium when you see how close it was with Max.
“However, we are all aware that this is not enough, and we need to keep pushing in order to be closer to the McLaren. This is very clear for the whole team. It doesn’t change that we shall be satisfied with what we’ve done this weekend.”
Here’s Lewis Hamilton on recovery