Ferrari had another forgetful F1 grand prix in Hungary, finishing behind three teams with a low-key result for Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
For Ferrari, they took seventh and eighth in the Hungarian GP. For the team itself, they seem to be just petering along this season. One particular highlight was the start made by Sainz. As it was, the Spaniard began the race on softs which attributed to his start being a spectacular one and getting past three cars from eighth.
He was helped too by Zhou Guanyu’s sluggish get away and subsequent incident, but their tyre degradation and inconsistency problem continues to haunt them. “Definitely, it paid off at the start,” said Sainz to media. “I was obviously on an aggressive position there and it worked well”.
“So it looked encouraging at the beginning then as soon as we went to the harder tyres and longer stints, our pace settled down a bit and our weaknesses started to appear. It’s been a trend that when the stints become longer and on harder tyres, that’s where we deg more than the Mercedes or the Red Bull or McLaren, for example”.
“Then we start suffering. When you start on softs, you’re exposed yourself to that a bit more. It is exactly what happened. We will see. Definitely this weekend has been an interesting weekend to see that happen in a track where maybe we expected to be a bit stronger Our competitors have been quicker and we need to put our head down and see where we can make the next steps”.
“We have a fundamental weakness with the car in race pace. Especially when we go to a harder compound and when the stint instead of being 15 laps has to be 30 laps. That’s where those last 10 laps of the stint count… In the end Russell was 1.5 seconds quicker, which makes also the fighting pretty much worthless because they are so much quicker that we cannot even fight”.
“It’s something that we’re looking into every race and we’re trying to improve. At the same time, I feel like we have some understanding and we need to develop the car if we want to get it better in these conditions,” summed up Sainz. But starting on softs was a gamble, it may have been a better idea for him to begin on the medium compound.
He wanted that as well. “I suggested the mediums because the soft at the beginning of the race was quite good, but in the end they prefer the hards, which is understandable,” said Sainz. “Nothing to say, just the hard for me this weekend, the harder the compound are the more difficult it’s been for sure.”
For Sainz’s team-mate, Leclerc, it was not a good weekend and in particular his race. A slow pit stop along with a five second penalty for a speeding violation in the pit lane. It’s been an irritating season for the popular Monagasque.
“I mean, the pitstop was quite slow,” said Leclerc. “And we had a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane. Again a weekend that is difficult. Honestly, it’s frustrating overall, because I felt that with the pace we had today… even as a driver, when you are feeling like you’re doing a good job with a car you have, nobody really notices it”.
“And whenever you are doing a bad job, everybody notices it. In the end, it’s part of the game. And it’s just up to us now to do a step forward as McLaren did. Now, we are in the backfoot. And it’s been confirmed since the last three weekends. There’s a lot of work to do again. I feel like the result is much worse than what it felt like”.
“The first stint felt pretty good, then with the slow stop, it really put us on the backfoot being behind Lance Stroll. I had to push a lot. Then we were with Carlos, and we lost a bit of time there. Then in the third stint, I pushed again and there again, the car felt quite okay. So, I feel like the result looks worse than what it actually is. But it’s clear that compared to Lando especially we are still behind,” summed up Leclerc.
It was a weekend to forget for Leclerc but unlike Sainz, he doesn’t feel that tyre gegradation was as significant an issue this weekend as previous ones. “Considering how much we were pushing, I don’t think it was that bad,” he said. “But I don’t want to comment too much on that. Because to be honest, in the car, you’ve only got your own picture. I could see that with Lewis in front in the first stint”.
“I felt like we were doing a really good job on tyre management. Third stint with Oscar, it felt like I was doing a good job with tyre management. But I don’t know what the other three guys in the front were doing. So I’ll have to check that before.”
A further issue for Leclerc during the weekend was over his radio messages not being understood. By all accounts it has been an issue for a number of grands prix now. An amusing one but surely that could be rectified fairly quickly in this day and age with the technology out there.
“The problem is that we have also lots of problems with the radio, and one out of four words is not understood by my engineer, because there’s just problems with our radios in three, four races,” said Leclerc. “So we need to fix that. And obviously my tone of voice is quite high because I need to make myself heard. But I just wanted to make sure that they didn’t understand me wrong, and that I want you to go aggressive early, and not aggressive late. So it was just about clarifying because of our radio issues.”
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out