Charles Leclerc calls for Ferrari investigation after costly Baku ‘misjudgements’

Charles Leclerc has admitted there were two “misjudgements” made by himself and Ferrari, leading to a defeat to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.

Leclerc started the Azerbaijan Grand Prix from pole position and controlled the pace up front to open up a five-second lead by the time of his pitstop – only to be hunted down by Piastri and overtaken at the start of the second stint.

Charles Leclerc overtaken by Oscar Piastri in daring pass

While there had been no issues for Ferrari through the pit-stop cycle, Leclerc came under pressure from Piastri on Lap 19 as the Australian driver rapidly chased down the Monegasque after the stops.

Starting Lap 20, Piastri dived up the inside of Leclerc into the 90-degree left-handed Turn 1 and managed to get his car slowed down to make the apex – moving past into the lead with a thrilling move that appeared to have caught Leclerc by surprise.

But, speaking in the press conference after the race, 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 tyres.

“I was really struggling to put those tyres into temperature.”

But Leclerc revealed how he had decided against defending too hard as he believed he would get an opportunity to respond – something he believed he’d judged incorrectly.

“I just thought it wasn’t that much of a big deal if he would overtake me at that point of the race,” he said.

“Because the race was still long and the DRS would help me to stay within a second of him and then, once my tyres will be in temperature, I could overtake him again. But that was a misjudgment from my side.”

Given that his lead had rapidly shrunk from over five seconds down to being overtaken over the course of three laps, having pitted at the end of Lap 16, Leclerc said an investigation would be needed to figure out how Piastri had latched onto him so quickly.

With the first misjudgement being his choice to not fight Piastri harder due to the different setup choices, meaning overtaking on the straight proved too difficult, Leclerc said: “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.”

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Fred Vasseur: We were too shy on the out-lap

Speaking to media after the race, Vasseur agreed with Leclerc’s assessment that the undercut of Piastri having stopped the lap before Ferrari had played a big role in the change of leader.

“I think we lost it probably a little bit on the in-lap – we can consider that it would have been better to pit one lap before,” Vasseur said.

“But it’s a different story, because it was a plan to make the gap and to pit the lap after,”

Added to that was the team call to take it easy on the out-lap, which resulted in allowing Piastri to latch onto Leclerc and get within the critical DRS range.

“We were a bit shy on the out-lap, clearly it was on the out-lap that we lost the most compared to Piastri,” Vasseur said.

“Because we were convinced that, for the last stint of 36 laps or so, we had to do a slow introduction and avoid pushing too much on the out-lap.”

There’s also the question mark of the use of hard tyres, with Leclerc explaining that he had started to struggle “straight away” as the harder compound was fitted to his Ferrari.

“As soon as I got out of the box on the hard, we just didn’t manage to find the grip that McLaren had on those tyres,” he said.

“And then again, when Oscar overtook me, I was quite calm in the car. And I just was focusing on my tyre management, which I did.

“And after 10, 15 laps, I thought that everything was coming together and that maybe towards the end, we will be in a better place. But with the dirty air, I think for 20, 25 laps towards the end, my tyres were completely gone. And again, they were just too quick in the straights for me to attempt anything.”

With Leclerc having pulled away comfortably on the medium tyre, before losing out quickly on the hards, Vasseur doubts that it was the car’s use of the compound itself that was the issue.

“Perhaps, but I’m not really convinced,” he said.

“I think it’s more the fact that we did 30 laps behind someone, and we weren’t in the clean air.”

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