During the race, Leclerc had to fight with his teammate Carlos Sainz and George Russell from Williams. He managed to move up to fourth place by using a strategy of making only one pit stop.
However, even though people thought Ferrari would do well in the race, Leclerc and Sainz couldn’t go any faster. Leclerc ended up in fourth place, far behind Sergio Perez in third and Lando Norris in second.
Leclerc was surprised by how slow Ferrari was on the hard tires. He changed from medium tires to hard tires after 21 laps, but it didn’t help him catch up to the leaders.
“I don’t think we found it [the pace] as a team, especially on the hard tyres, which is a bit strange because the strength of this car since the beginning of the year is it’s very solid in all conditions with all tyres,” Leclerc said.
“Today is a bit an outlier because as soon as we put on the hards, we were half a second off. So that is very strange. We will look into it and try to understand what went wrong on that run.”
After his pit stop and after the safety car periods ended, Leclerc wanted to fight with Norris for second place, but he couldn’t keep up with Norris or the leaders.
“It’s very strange, especially compared with the McLaren. With Lando at first, I really thought we were going to fight with him,” he added.
“I was doing good tire management until the safety car that reset it a little bit, all strategies, which is a bit of a shame because I think we were doing a good job and then, on the hard, we were just slow.
“We were expecting this weekend to be very similar or in line with whatever we’ve seen since the beginning of the season, but we were struggling quite a bit more.”
