From a 46-point advantage to a 49-point deficit in the last six races: despite there were ‘only’ 164 points at stake, also considering the 8 offered by the Sprint race at Imola and the additional six points available for the fastest laps, Charles Leclerc literally saw his lead collapse while Max Verstappen became the favorite for the world title this season.
Red Bull driver, who after the first three races suffered two retirements due to technical issues, in Bahrain and Australia – the last race won by Charles Leclerc and Ferrari so far in the 2022 Formula 1 season – said at that moment he would need 45 races to catch up with Ferrari, but since then he has won five of the last six races bringing the tally of victories to six by adding the one taken in Saudi Arabia on the occasion of the second round of the season.
Ferrari’s competitiveness has not diminished in the last two months of the championship, on the contrary, but the power unit built in Maranello which forced him to retire both at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona and at the Baku City Circuit in Azerbaijan has betrayed the Monegasque driver twice. In both situations Charles Leclerc was in the lead and above all in Barcelona he seemed to be in full control of the situation, with a solid advantage to administer and even fresher tires than his rivals.
In Canada, to remedy these two failures, Ferrari stocked up on fresh power units by introducing various new components – not updated, but simply new – which forced Charles Leclerc to start from the back row, as the Monegasque driver recovered to fifth place in Montreal. Now starting this weekend at Silverstone the goal is to reverse this negative trend and take a Formula 1 victory that has now been missing for three months.
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According to the engineer Claudio Lombardi, who during the period 1992-2000 was Engine Technical director of Ferrari for F1 and GT cars, believes that Ferrari did well to take risks in terms of power unit design, despite the recent reliability issues: “When you are the challenger you have to take risks – he said, in a recent interview for formulapassion.it – “and reliability is a risk by definition. It is much better to make a fast car than a turbo-diesel that never breaks down and is not very fast, that’s a problem. It may be that for a couple of races Ferrari decides to adopt more conservative settings at this stage, losing a bit of performance, but then once they understand the problem they will return to the level they were before.” – Claudio Lombardi concluded.
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