After all the talk, the Las Vegas Grand Prix turned out to be entertaining and competitive. The car with the best characteristics for the Nevada track, the Ferrari SF-23, competed with the one with the best overall characteristics, namely the Red Bull RB19. This highlights that Red Bull’s real strength is its consistent performance, compared to competitors who take turns challenging it depending on the characteristics of individual tracks. However, the data indicates that Ferrari had a concrete chance to beat the elusive Adrian Newey’s car on the track.
First stint: with the medium tires, Ferrari was the best car on the track
After the controversial start and the initial 2-second lead taken by Max Verstappen over Charles Leclerc, there was a fear that, once again, the Dutchman would run away in solitude. However, somewhat surprisingly, the management of his RB19’s front tires proved to be suboptimal. The additional thermal cycle due to the initial Safety Car led Max Verstappen to encounter increasing graining on the front right tire, with performance starting to decline rapidly. Charles Leclerc, who had maintained a good pace up to that point, quickly closed the gap and returned to the lead. The Red Bull team immediately called the 3-time World Champion to prevent him from losing too much time with tires now in crisis. This particular situation was a first in the season: a struggling Red Bull, moreover, on a medium compound, compared to a Ferrari that was decidedly more effective in terms of tire management. This confirms the perfection of the setup put on the SF-23, especially the strength of the front end, an anomaly compared to other races, likely allowed by the low-downforce setup and a truly perfect mechanical setup. This left Charles Leclerc (who had a fantastic race in terms of management) in the ideal window until the natural degradation of the first set of tires.
Charles Leclerc maintained the pace and extended the first stint by a significant 6 laps compared to Max Verstappen, almost 10 minutes more, without suffering any performance drop. This once again confirms that when a car “hits” the right operating range and can maintain it, the positive effects on pace and degradation are exponential. The absence of fast corners and low temperatures, combined with the long straights, evidently provided a “rebalancer” to potential tire overheating, which Ferrari usually struggles with, while Max Verstappen seemed to have to push too hard in the early laps without managing tire warming properly, a challenging phase for Red Bull given the conditions, and then collapsed at the end of the stint, a situation that is generally very difficult to recover for those chasing.
Source: Federico Albano for formulapassion.it
Safety Car and thermal cycle: why Charles Leclerc was in difficulty
The entry of the Safety Car following the contact between George Russell and Max Verstappen was a fatal blow to an innocent Charles Leclerc’s race. Firstly, the decision to pit was very difficult to make: Perez would have stayed at that point leading the race with new tires, and Leclerc had almost the entire field within his Safety Car window, with the enormous risk that a minimal problem in the pit would not only have cost him the first position to the Mexican but also many other placements, all to change tires that had only completed 5 laps, compared to Verstappen’s 11, who found himself making a decidedly simpler choice. However, Charles Leclerc went from a situation of absolute advantage, even in terms of tires, to a much more difficult one: as he himself recounted in interviews after the race, the Monegasque driver had just finished gradually bringing the hard tires to temperature when the Safety Car came in. This caused the tires to collapse again in temperature, with the need to bring them back into the window from scratch.
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The problem is that each thermal cycle of this type has a significant influence on tire life and performance, which is why Charles Leclerc found himself running defensively in the second part of the race. Ferrari’s pace even in these conditions proved to be really good because, based on the data, Verstappen, with all the advantages described above, was still only slightly faster than Ferrari, not more than 2 tenths, while Perez, even when he found himself in front, couldn’t shake off the SF-23 number 16, which then reclaimed the second position with a fantastic late braking move by Charles Leclerc. Sergio Perez’s inferiority compared to the level of drivers like Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc is also evident from the fact that the Mexican had the race in his hands, in the lead with new tires, and finished only in third place.
Charles Leclerc’s overtake, a phenomenal braking move
We gathered data on Charles Leclerc’s overtake on Sergio Perez, and a couple of key aspects are noticeable. The first is that Charles Leclerc, with DRS and slipstream, reached a speed of 354 km/h before braking, against Sergio Perez’s 332 km/h. Despite the impressive 22 km/h higher speed, Charles Leclerc even braked a few meters later (between 3 and 5 according to our calculations) than the Mexican, producing a violent braking move without, however, overshooting or experiencing any lock-ups. According to the data we receive (but to be taken with a grain of salt on instantaneous values of acceleration), Charles Leclerc’s braking move would have even exceeded 7G of deceleration (against Perez’s “meager” 4.1).
In conclusion, in Las Vegas, Ferrari had the pace for victory, and in addition to the Safety Car, Carlos Sainz’s absence from the front row he had achieved in qualifying probably influenced the result, preventing any kind of team play and leaving Charles Leclerc alone against the 2 Red Bulls. In this case too, the responsibility is certainly not that of the team, so there is little to learn in that regard. In any case, the excellent American race should not lead to easy enthusiasm from a performance perspective even in the future.
The track was absolutely the best possible for the SF-23, and this hid (but did not erase) the significant inherent flaws of the car. The positive aspects, those to be collected, are excellent exploitation of the package both in pure performance and in strategies and race situations (obviously beyond unpredictable Safety Car situations). The execution of the weekends continues to be a strong point of Fred Vasseur’s management, and while it alone is certainly not enough to win, it is a significant step forward for the Maranello team, which will now go head-to-head for the second place in the constructors’ championship in Abu Dhabi with a disappointing Mercedes in this last part of the season.
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