Ferrari explains mistakes with Leclerc strategy

Ferrari chief strategist Iñaque Rueda explained in detail the mistakes in Charles Leclerc’s race strategy the team made at the Monaco Grand Prix. Monegask led the home race confidently, but miscalculations from the Scuderia not only deprived him of the chance to win, but also to finish on the podium.

Iñaque Rueda: “We made two mistakes with Charles, the first was when we tried to get back on track for Sergio Perez. In the case of Carlos Sainz, we realized too late that he would return to the track behind Perez, while Charles had enough advantage and we thought it would be enough to get ahead of Sergio after the pit stop.

At the start of lap 18, Charles was ten seconds ahead of Perez. We knew Sergio would close the gap because we saw that he was faster on medium tires than Charles on wet tires. We evaluated the speed of other riders, saw the telemetry data and thought the ten second lead would be reduced to five, four or in the worst case three seconds.

Over the course of the circle, we watched the advantage melt to seven, six, five, four seconds. In the “Pool” corner area, we last received real-time breakout data showing that Charles would return to the track after the pit stop one second ahead of Perez. However, we didn’t expect Sergio to make his lap nine seconds faster – at that point Charles gave up the lead.”

Rueda added that Ferrari’s second mistake was due to the decision to make a double pit stop, which is called “doppio” in Italy.

We planned to keep Carlos in the lead in the race and at the same time we tried to beat Charles Perez to finish in first and second place. When our riders drove to the pit lane, we did all the calculations and estimated the gap between them, which was five seconds at the time – we decided the time had come for the doppio.

For a comfortable doppio the difference between the cars should be six seconds, but we decided that five and a half would be enough. On the way to the pits the gap between our drivers narrowed and before the pit lane it was only three and a half seconds.

We made one last attempt to leave Charles on track, but it was too late – he had already entered the pit lane. As a result, due to the double pit stop, Charles lost two seconds, which were crucial and allowed Verstappen to return to the track for Charles later.

The team experiences conflicting emotions after Monaco. On the one hand there were many good things, but there are also things we are not proud of. Basically, we’ve analyzed everything, updated our tools and procedures to come back stronger after the experience.”