Charles Leclerc Urges Ferrari To Discover Reason For Lost Baku Win

Chris Ladd | Sep 18, 2024

May 5, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc (16) during the Miami Grand Prix at Miami International Autodrome. Mandatory Credit: Peter Casey-Imagn Images / Peter Casey-Imagn Images

Oscar Piastri’s decisive move on Charles Leclerc during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was a defining moment in the race. Leclerc, who had started from pole and controlled the pace early on, seemed in command after his first stint. However, Piastri's rapid pace after the pit stops put him in a position to challenge for the lead.

Piastri’s bold overtaking move on Lap 2 caught Leclerc at a moment when the Ferrari driver might have been expecting a challenge but not quite in that manner. The move was clean, precise, and perfectly timed, allowing Piastri to seize the lead.

According to a report by PlanetF1, Leclerc said he hadn’t been surprised by the move “because he wasn’t completely straight behind me.”

“He was a little bit on the left,” he said. “So I could see in my mirrors that he was there and that it was a possibility for him to go there. But again, I couldn’t really be super aggressive. I still had cold tires. I was really struggling to put those tires into temperature.

“I just thought it wasn’t that much of a big deal if he would overtake me at that point of the race,” Leclerc said. “Because the race was still long and the DRS would help me to stay within a second of him and then, once my tires will be in temperature, I could overtake him again. But that was a misjudgment from my side.”

He continued:

“We expected the undercut today to be a very difficult thing to do, just because we thought that the warm-up on the hard would be extremely difficult for some reason.

“I don’t really have the explanation yet because I haven’t gone into details. I just jumped out of the car, but we’ve got to look into how the gap went from six seconds to one and a half, because that is definitely not what we expected. And that is a lot.

“Even on a track where undercuts are big, it’s still four seconds and a half or four seconds – a lot of lap time loss, which I don’t exactly know why and where we’ve lost this lap time. So this will be an analysis.

“But when we speak about that amount of lap time, I think it will be straightforward. And we’ll see very quickly whether they just had a much better warm-up with the hard than us or whether we’ve lost it anywhere else.”