Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc was around 7 km/h slower than Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on the straights in the third free practice session for the 2022 French Grand Prix at the Paul Ricard Circuit, implying he was using less power/higher fuel:
Charles Leclerc completed a first part of the session with a medium-low fuel load and a hard tires, simulating the last part of the race and collecting data on the hard compound. The Monegasque driver liked the car in those conditions and was still easy to drive, a little more “deaf” to any aggressive attacks on the corners. However, mounting the soft for the simulation of a single lap, the Monegasque was more into difficulty. The car became hyper-reactive, with an extremely precise front (a sign that Ferrari is trying to protect it from a race point of view) but a slightly too light rear.
What is interesting is that Charles Leclerc did not try to change the set-up but asked the pits to make laps with the soft compound to learn how to drive the car with that tire, defining the transition from hard to soft with a bad word. Ferrari therefore seems to have sought in night work an ideal balance for the race, with Charles (the only driver of the Maranello team who will compete in the entire qualifying given Carlos Sainz’s grid penalty) who will try to adapt the driving style to the soft tire, with the obvious awareness that from a race point of view, pace and less degradation will make an enormously greater difference compared to a starting position. We will see shortly if these impressions are confirmed or not.
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