Charles Leclerc confirmed that he has no regrets over his and Ferrari’s decision to attempt to get to the end of the 2021 Turkish Grand Prix with old inters.
With track conditions at Istanbul not drying up enough for drivers to be able to use the slicks in the final stages of the race, leaders Valtteri Bottas and Max Verstappen decided to pit around lap 36 for fresh inters to see them through to the end.
Yet Charles Leclerc, who had been able to stay close to Max Verstappen ahead of the Red Bull driver’s pitstop, chose to stay out and initially it looked like a good call as his rivals did not seem to close up on him.
However, as the track dried out, Charles Leclerc began to suffer more and more as the tyre performance dropped off – and in the end he was forced to pit on lap 47 having just lost the lead to Bottas.
Falling back behind his main rivals, Charles Leclerc encountered difficulties with graining on the new inters during the first few laps and eventually had to settle for fourth place, unable to defend against Sergio Perez.
Despite the fact that a podium finish was more than possible at Istanbul Park with a safe strategy, Charles Leclerc confirmed that he was completely comfortable with the Maranello team’s gamble and felt that it was not actually much of a risk to stay out.
“I had all the info I needed at that time, and once Valtteri pitted [from the lead], I was asking quite a lot on the radio, ‘okay what are the lap times on the new inters? For the first five/six laps we were actually more or less in line with the pace. So for me it was clear that it was not just rolling the dice. I think I was quite, and we were all, confident with that choice. But it was a bit of a strange race with the new inters for six or seven laps. They had like a graining phase, and once you went through the graining phase then you were finding a lot of pace again. That’s basically exactly what happened. So no regrets on my side.”
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Once the pace on the old inters had gone, Charles Leclerc felt that there was no point to staying out as he would have ultimately lost out to the chasing cars anyway.
“It would have been very, very difficult without stopping to be honest. The rear tyres were very difficult to handle in the last four laps before my pit stop, and that’s why we did the pit stop actually. I struggled a lot with rear locking and that pushed me to do some mistakes. I don’t think [we would have come home] better than where we finished with the pitstop.” – the Ferrari driver concluded.
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