After the long-awaited victory in Monte Carlo, Charles Leclerc seems unable to find peace and harmony with the new version of the SF-24, and technical difficulties are compounded by external factors that certainly don’t help. At the Austrian Grand Prix, where he started from the sixth position, the Monegasque found himself in a “sandwich” between Oscar Piastri and Sergio Perez at the start, and a piece of his front wing flew off. The Maranello team immediately called him into the pits to replace it, which severely compromised his race.
Commenting on the incident on his YouTube channel, Italian former racing driver and the 2012 GP2 Series champion, Davide Valsecchi, wanted to highlight both the driver’s bad luck and a small mistake: “Charles Leclerc had a normal start, even though it was worse than Carlos Sainz’s, and reached the first corner a few meters behind Lewis Hamilton. In the first few meters, not only do you need good fortune, but you also need to be aggressive because if you’re in the middle and hesitate, your opponents will take your space. Neither Piastri nor Perez could see Charles Leclerc in their mirrors, so they believed there was clear track space to exploit. Of course, it’s easy to comment from home, and it’s undeniable that Charles was unlucky, but he probably needed to be more aggressive; the other two were, and they took his space. If you don’t start brilliantly, and this has been a problem for Ferrari in recent GPs, those beside you already think about passing you. Additionally, number 16 also paid for being 2 or 3 meters behind Carlos Sainz, and to top it all off, he didn’t have a perfect qualifying lap, starting in the middle of the pack.” – Davide Valsecchi concluded.
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