“It’s a shame we couldn’t win today, but we can say we truly tried everything. Unfortunately, the victory slipped away yesterday in qualifying: Lando did a better job than us and deserves this success.” Not that there was any doubt, but how much Charles Leclerc cared about winning ‘his’ Monaco Grand Prix became even clearer starting from lap 58, the first of twenty laps during which Charles was in Norris’s DRS zone. It was an attempt that had to be made, trying to pressure the race leader despite knowing that without a mistake from him, there would be no chance.
“I really believed until the end,” admitted Leclerc. “I spent the whole night thinking about the two or three points where I could try something on Lando, and I was willing to take all possible risks to try to win. But, unfortunately, those opportunities never came. There were two or three laps when I thought ‘okay, maybe I’ll try’, but Lando defended very well.”
In the end, Charles Leclerc had to accept the obvious: the foundation of a Monaco victory is laid on Saturday afternoon, something he knows very well. “I can’t say I’m happy with second place, but looking on the bright side, this result still goes beyond our expectations for the weekend, so it should be considered a good outcome. My 18 points plus Lewis’s 10 are very valuable in our current situation.”
Monaco remains, in any case, Ferrari’s best weekend of the season so far. Things went well enough that it led Leclerc (and not only him) to think big, to believe in the big hit — but the positives clearly outweigh the regrets.
Seven days ago, after the Imola Grand Prix, the conversation was quite different, and in this context, the Monte Carlo result is a significant breath of fresh air for the entire Scuderia. “Overall, we can be satisfied with today’s result,” commented Frederic Vasseur. “We really brought home the maximum, especially considering how hard it is to overtake on this track. Charles managed the situation very well, constantly putting pressure (on Lando), while Lewis showed great pace by climbing up to fifth place before getting stuck a bit in traffic.”
Hamilton paid a high price for the three-place grid penalty received in qualifying, and his race was not straightforward. As usual, Fred Vasseur defended Lewis’s race, and even though Lewis Hamilton scored as many points as realistically possible, the final 51-second gap to Norris (48 to Leclerc) seemed excessive.
“With Lewis’s penalty, we effectively had only one car to fight against the two McLaren cars, which put us at a slight disadvantage,” said Fred Vasseur. “But above all, with the last set of hards, Lewis Hamilton’s pace was very far from the front group.”
Ferrari will need Hamilton too, especially in terms of the Constructors’ Championship. Thanks to a struggling Mercedes and a Red Bull that keeps scoring with only one car, the Scuderia is now just five points away from second place.
“In recent races we’ve made progress in high-speed corners, and this weekend we saw improvements in the slower sections too, which is encouraging,” concluded Fred Vasseur. “We need to keep working and focus on ourselves to continue on our growth path.”
With the most atypical weekend of the season behind, Formula 1 will be back on track in a few days on what is considered the most technical circuit on the calendar. The ‘driver’ variable will lose a few percentage points in the value scale in favor of the technical package. It will be an important moment to understand what this Ferrari can aim for in the summer phase of the season.
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