Leclerc: I don’t know why they called me to the pits so early

The British leg of the championship was unsuccessful for Ferrari: Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz started from 4th and 5th at the very bottom of the top ten. After the race, both admitted that the car simply lacked speed.

Charles Leclerc (9th): “We didn’t have much of a problem with the rubber degradation, but the car just didn’t have enough speed today. We struggled in the first part of the race, while McLaren and Mercedes were going very fast.

George Russell showed impressive speed on soft tyres, but I managed to stop him. I don’t know what happened then and why I was called to the pit stop so early. However, I don’t have all the information, so I don’t want to comment on it. When we then switched to hard tyres, we were obviously in an unfavorable position.

I tried to keep about the same pace as the riders who stayed on the track and kept riding on the already worn medium hard rubber to attack as they went into the pits. Unfortunately they made their pit stops when the safety car came out, giving them all an advantage.

Overall it wasn’t our best race. In the last stint I tried to attack when I ran another set of Medium but Alex Albon was in front of me and he stayed behind the other car and could use DRS so it was impossible for Williams to overtake him.

I think when we arrived at Silverstone we were already prepared for the fact that we were going to have a difficult weekend, although of course we didn’t expect things to be this bad. If we performed a little better than expected in qualifying, we did a little worse in the race. So we have a lot to work on.”

Carlo Sainz (10th): “The biggest problem today was that the pace was not up to our expectations. McLaren and Mercedes were faster than us, and that already caused problems. To be honest I was happy with how I ran the race, I managed to extend the stretch on the Medium tyres, but even when I got to the front on the hard rubber I showed good speed.

But unfortunately the safety car left the track at the most inopportune moment for me. I ran out of Medium sets and all the soft tires had already been broken in, so we decided to stay on the hard rubber, but nothing good came of it.

The McLaren drivers were just faster than us, much faster than we expected, Mercedes too, and they managed to avoid the increased degradation of the rubber. Before Silverstone, we knew we had to analyze the car’s behavior on this fast track to properly assess the level of our progress, but it turned out that we were still not doing well at high speeds and windy conditions.

Frederick Vasseur, Team boss: “We planned to race with one pit stop, start on Medium and then switch to hard tyres. But we called both riders to pit stops before the safety car came out, and this definitely put us in an unfavorable position.

However, it cannot be said that our positions at the finish are explained by this episode alone. The problems started on Friday when Charles was unable to work on the track during second practice, so we only did one long set of circles on soft tyres, after which we had doubts due to possible increased relegation.

So we decided to go for the Medium and Hard tyres, which turned out to be too conservative a choice as the degradation was lower than expected. This will be an important lesson for us. The car in its current state showed better results.

The next race is in Hungary on a completely different track with warmer weather, so it’s important to learn how to adapt the SF-23 to the different conditions we race in.

We continue to upgrade the car and will soon present the next technical updates, but the 2nd place from the 10th with such a density of results is separated by a very short interval, so even the smallest mistake leads to serious consequences.