Charles Leclerc: I don’t know why I got Hard

Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc started second and third in Hungary, giving Ferrari a good chance of a winning double. However, the results of the race were disappointing for the Scuderia and its fans – only fourth and sixth place.

Immediately after the finish, Charles Leclerc, who was the only one of the leaders to complete the segment on hard tires, wondered why the team had put the hardest set of tires on his pit stop.

Carlos Sainz (4th): “Obviously our team had problems in the race. Based on the information we got during Friday’s practice, we expected a high race pace.

However, today it was cooler, the track conditions have changed – as a result the tires and the car were not as fast as we expected. We have to analyze everything to understand exactly where we went wrong and get back in better shape after the summer break.

A hitch at the first pit stop cost me the chance to take out George Russell. As a result, he stayed ahead and I had to follow him into the “dirty” air. But what is, is. We’ve made a lot of pit stops all season, but lately there have been problems. We need to analyze what we can fix to perform stronger in the second half of the season.

I don’t know if we could do anything better in terms of strategy. When we don’t have pace, like today, it’s hard to do anything through strategy. We didn’t have speed on any of the tire sets, so there were no opportunities to act more flexibly.

Yes, a slow pit stop cost me a lot of money, but I don’t know if it was possible to change anything because of the strategy. We lacked speed. If we compare the pace from Friday and today, it becomes clear that there is something wrong with the car and the tires.

Charles Leclerc (6th): “I have no explanation for the strategy. I need to talk to the team to understand why they put hard tires on me. I felt very fast on the Medium tires, I had everything under control. I don’t know why I had to switch to Hard.

I told the team on the radio that I feel very comfortable on Medium and want to stay in this lineup for as long as possible. I don’t know why the team made a different decision.

I was quite happy with my pace, but the last stint on hard tires turned out to be a disaster for me. On this composition I had no speed at all – at that point we lost the race. We will discuss everything with the team and get better.”