After an emotional win at the Monaco Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc and Ferrari are now just 24 points behind Red Bull at the top of the F1 Constructors’ Championship.
But since then, Ferrari has been on the back foot, with both Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. managing just two podiums before the summer break and dropping them to third in the standings.
The Dutch Grand Prix looked set to play out in a similar fashion, with both drivers struggling in practice and, while Leclerc managed to make it into Q3 on Saturday, Sainz failed to make the third qualifying segment at all, making any good result, let alone a podium, seem like a pipe dream.
That all changed on Sunday, as not only did Sainz recover to finish fifth, but Leclerc also drove brilliantly to take third place ahead of Oscar Piastri and claim his seventh podium of the season.
After the race, Praise for Leclerc A “pleasant surprise” provided by Zandvoort.
“Yesterday we were struggling like crazy. Today we were strong. And these are things we have to work on. I think we also need to understand when we do something good as much as we analyse all the bad surprises that happen during the season,” Leclerc said. FIA press conference“I don’t think we have an explanation for it as a team right now. So it’s a great result. I’m really happy to be on the podium and I think it’s a really good surprise. But we have to understand it to be able to perform at our best more often.”
The Ferrari driver admitted he did not expect to be able to hold off Piastri in the final stages.
“it is [easy to find a rhythm at the end]”My engineer was talking about Oscar’s lap times, so he was a lot quicker than me in the free air, I think almost a second quicker, then when he came up I pushed a bit more and gained half a second, then in the dirty air I think he lost three or four tenths,” Leclerc explained. “He stayed behind and put me under a lot of pressure for a couple of laps, but he couldn’t stay there because of the overheating. It was a really good strategy. I didn’t expect to stay third until the end, but we did a really good job as a team. I don’t think we could have done more today.”
Looking at the upcoming calendar, there are several circuits that look favourable to Ferrari: the Italian Grand Prix is next weekend, with the Scuderia likely to bring its next upgrade series to its home race at Monza, followed by Azerbaijan, where Leclerc finished third in last season’s Grand Prix, and Singapore, where Sainz won a year ago.
Leclerc admitted he was optimistic about the upcoming timeline but set conditions.
“If you would have asked me that question yesterday I would have said it would be very difficult,” Leclerc said. When asked about future races“Today it’s much better. If we can understand what’s going on with our car, I’m very optimistic about the future. But for now we don’t fully understand it yet.”
Following those comments, Leclerc acknowledged that the upcoming schedule was “very important” for Ferrari.
“That’s very important. I think we had three or four races ago, where we did quite a lot of experimentation to understand what the underlying issues were with our car, for the mid-term development. We have an upgrade coming up soon. Now, I actually owe a lot of thanks to Fred. [Vasseur]”Having said that, it will be the same at Monza,” Leclerc said, and hopefully that will help us and help us close the gap.
“But we’ve always said that until the upgrades were made, our number one priority was to minimize the damage, and today we were targeting sixth place, and realistically, on paper, I think that’s what we were fighting for, but after three or four laps the pace was there,” Leclerc added, “and we got third place, which is another good surprise, good points, but now we just hope that the upgrades will help us move forward.”
