Jolyon Palmer on Charles Leclerc’s mistake

Former Formula 1 driver Jolyon Palmer, now an expert on the championship’s official website, analyzed in detail Charles Leclerc’s actions that led to the error, leaving him only sixth at Imola.

Jolyon Palmer: “There was a very dramatic moment at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix – when Championship leader Charles Leclerc flew off the track while in third place.

At that point, he battled Sergio Perez, who handled his duties perfectly all weekend, did everything perfectly for the Red Bull team and for the first time in six years they won the winning double.

At one time, the team tried for a long time to find a rider capable of such results, and this year Sergio has risen to the next level and is performing as he should.

When Charles switched to slicks, he managed to get out of the pits ahead of Sergio, but it is very difficult to drive on a drying track on not quite warm tires. Perez was overtaking him and at that point he was already able to attack him with full force, but Leclerc drove calmly ahead of him.

The battle for second position started, Charles had to defend himself and the asphalt only dried up on the race track and the track remained wet. Charles didn’t want to move to this part of the track, but Sergio did just that, although he took a lot of risk.

But he understood that this was his chance, acted resolutely, stepped forward and in doing so covered the rear of the confident leading Max Verstappen.

Then, on lap 49, Leclerc pitted again, although he could have reached the finish on Medium tires so there was no need to make a pit stop. For example, two other riders from the top five, Lando Norris and George Russell, did not go to the pits.

And Charles went, and there were probably two reasons for that. First, Ferrari clearly wanted to speed things up somehow, so they switched to soft tires to see if they could get good grip to overtake Perez. Second, they wanted to score the best lap of the race.

But it so happened that after leaving the pits, Leclerc was unable to fully exploit the potential of soft tires as he was behind Lando Norris’ McLaren and could only be one lap ahead of him. This allowed Perez to switch to Soft tires first, and then to Verstappen. So Red Bull decided to play it safe – just in case strange things happen to Medium tires at the end of the distance.

It can be assumed that if Leclerc had left the pits for Norris, Red Bull would not have switched tires and made it to the finish on Medium. In this situation, Charles would at least have set the best lap of the race.

But Leclerc saw an opportunity to battle for second place and was already on warm tires, while Perez had just left the pits and had no time to pick up speed, and the gap between the cars was very small. We can say that the riders have now changed roles.

But it was not possible to immediately get ahead of Sergio, so Charles made a second attempt – he really wanted to overtake the opponent. The DRS detection point is at the exit of the Variante Alta chicane, so he famously attacked the curb and made a mistake at the time, lost control of the car and he was lucky the case didn’t end with retirement.

Could he ride to the finish on these tires? Was it necessary to go back to the pits? Only Ferrari knows the answers to these questions, but the front fender was clearly damaged. But they wanted to make sure the car was in overall good shape and none of the wheels were flat, so they called Leclerc for a pit stop and he finished sixth.

That’s not a disaster, because if he had finished third, he would have only earned seven more points. In any case, the championship leader made a serious mistake.

The video footage from the onboard cameras clearly shows that Sergio Perez generally preferred these curbs, which resulted in a significant loss of time in the Variante Alta over Leclerc all weekend. Charles, knowing he was going through that chicane faster, was just exaggerating. It seems that this is the only reason that led to the turnaround.

In fact, Charles drove perfectly all season, but this was the first serious mistake. This year he often got into difficult situations, but each time he solved them. There wasn’t even much pressure on this one, but he was demanding too much of himself. But I repeat: after all, this is not a disaster compared to the situation if he crashed with the car, collided with a buffer. And so he still finished sixth.