Verstappen reduced the gap with Leclerc at the top of the championship to 27 points
Max Verstappen expressed his sympathy for the title contender Charles Leclerc after the Ferrari driver threw seven points with a potentially costly mistake in the Grand Prix of Emilia Romagna.
“It’s easy to do,” Verstappen said. “He was pushing hard. It’s painful, but he knows it himself. No need to hear that from anyone here. But it’s still such a long championship. It’s not great, but you can’t change it now. He doesn’t do it on purpose. “
Verstappen’s remarks reflect genuine respect between the two men, who will compete in this year’s championship and whose personal racing history dates back to their childhood, when they competed in karting.
But they will be of little consolation to Leclerc, who knows he has made a mistake he cannot afford against such a persistent and great rival as Verstappen.
“I was too greedy,” Leclerc said, “and I paid the price for it and lost seven potential points compared to my third place before, so it’s a shame.
“Seven points are valuable at the end of the championship for sure. And that should not be repeated.”
Leclerc came in at the weekend with 46 points ahead of Verstappen. He left it with a reduction of his lead to 27, and the Dutchman returned to second place in the championship.
How did the mistake happen?
Leclerc tweeted after the race that he “gave everything” but went “over the limit”
Leclerc’s mistake came because he had seen a short result that seemed impossible before, and he was trying his best to figure it out.
Verstappen and team-mate Sergio Perez were on their way to a comfortable Red Bull line one or two when Ferrari stopped Leclerc for another set of 13-lap tires. They saw an opportunity to attack Peres, who was on the move, and hoped Red Bull would catch the bait and also stand up to the Mexican.
They did, and after being more than two seconds from Red Bull before the stops, Leclerc suddenly found himself within seconds.
The only place on the Leclerc track was constantly faster than Perez on the chic Variante Alta. It is followed by only two turns of the Rivazza before the DRS overtaking area. So Leclerc tried to get as close as possible.
But he took too much curb at Variante Alta and the car spun. He was lucky that he only lightly touched the barriers and managed to rejoin, get new tires and a new front fender, and get back on the track. The incident reduced him to ninth, but he managed to recover three places before the end.
“I saw an opportunity I didn’t think existed before,” Leclerc said. “All points count. And today I left seven points against the 15 we had if we were third. I will study in the future. That’s right, I analyzed the data. I know what I did and I will move on. “
This was Leclerc’s first significant mistake of the season, reminiscent of previous mistakes from previous years, when Ferraris were less competitive and he sometimes went too far, trying to achieve results the car did not deserve.
The same thing happened in Imola, but he knows he has to recalibrate his approach, now he has a competing car and has to deliver every weekend if he wants to endure a year-long battle with Verstappen and Red Bull.
“Maybe this one is a little different,” he said. “It’s a little more than the mental approach you had in this part of the race. But I have always been strong in knowing the feeling I had in this part of the race and how to correct it.
“It’s a mistake and I’m learning from it and I won’t do it again. I was a little lucky because I only lost seven points, but they are seven that could be valuable at the end of the season.”
It was a miserable day for fans as Leclerc’s Ferrari team-mate Carlos Sainz dropped out of the race on the first lap.
Is there a decisive change in performance?
It was a difficult weekend for Ferrari. After dominating Australia for the last time, a track on which they expected Red Bull to have the upper hand, they decided that Imola would suit them better.
But Ferrari’s car is still in the same spec that started the season. Red Bull appeared in Italy with a few seemingly small improvements and seemed to have a slight advantage from the start.
“We had the upper hand in Bahrain and Australia, and they had the upper hand this weekend in Jeddah,” Leclerc said. “So yes, it’s very, very close. And I think it will be like that until the end of the season.
“Only time will tell [Red Bull] I did. Honestly, with Red Bull or one weekend they are stronger and another is us. This has been the case since the beginning of the season.
“I still think we’re more or less there and it depends on the track who will come out on top. I don’t think there are still significant differences, but yes, they were a little stronger than us this weekend.”
Redemption for Red Bull
Remarkably, this was the first Red Bull one or two in nearly six years, after the Malaysian Grand Prix in 2016, and it was exactly what they needed to get their season back after a tough weekend in Melbourne. where Verstappen had a fuel line interruption causing his retirement, his second of three races.
That was the context in which team director Christian Horner called it “one of our best results so far.”
“It was important to take some points from Ferrari, which we did in both tables and we will try to upgrade it in Miami,” he said.
“Ferrari has a great car and great drivers. They were unlucky here, but they will be super competitive in two weeks and I think it will be so all season long.”
Verstappen certainly does not expect this to be the beginning of a new attack on Red Bull.
“Of course, we brought improvements,” he said, “but I don’t know, of course, how much it actually gave us just because of the hectic weekend with, you know, rain, dry. It is very difficult to judge.
“I’m just very happy with the way we did all weekend. We were just a little better on top of that than in Australia, and that’s sometimes more important than actually bringing something new. I guess that time will show now in the upcoming competitions how our upgrades are very useful.
“They’re still very fast and Miami can be, again, very different.”
Mercedes is still looking for answers
George Russell drives brilliantly to finish fourth, but Mercedes still faces serious problems
The prospect of someone else getting involved in the bilateral battle on the front seems as distant as ever after Imola.
Lando Norris was exceptional for McLaren – as he was on the same track last year – and took advantage of Leclerc’s accident to take last place on the podium.
But while McLaren has progressed significantly and consistently since its poor start to the season, Norris was about a second slower than Red Bulls and Ferrari, a difference that Formula One doesn’t usually cover in one season.
As for the world champion Mercedes, George Russell participated, rising from 11th on the grid to sixth in the first lap and might have challenged Norris for third if the team had not had a technical malfunction at his pit stop and was unable to to add the front compressive force he needed to balance the car on smooth tires.
Lewis Hamilton, meanwhile, had his worst weekend in years, finishing 13th. In both the sprint race on Saturday and the Grand Prix, he got stuck in what is known in Formula One as “DRS trains”, where a series of cars run together, each of which benefits from overtaking and therefore no one can pass.
There’s no reason to believe that Hamilton would have been slower than Russell if he had been out in the open, but he never got a chance to show his true pace. And after writing off Mercedes’ hopes for the title on Saturday, the seven-time champion reduced his statements to the media to a minimum on Sunday.
The Mercedes car looked shocking on the track, its high-speed aerodynamic bouncing – or rendering – on the right was terribly bad.
Team boss Wolfe apologized to Hamilton for this after the race, saying: “You see the jump on the main line, I wonder how they can even keep the car on the track sometimes.”
“Except for the jump,” Russell said, “the car feels really good to drive, but the jump really takes your breath away. I hope we find a solution because it is not sustainable for drivers.
“This is the first weekend of battling back and chest pain from the weight of jumping. But this is what we need to do to get through the fastest lap times of the car.”
Mercedes needs to drive the car at a higher altitude than they want to keep the jump under some control. The problem is that before Mercedes can solve the problem, they need to understand what is causing it. And they don’t.
Wolff said: “The main problem that overshadows everything is that our car is moving more than others. And because of the jump, we can’t steer it where it’s supposed to go, and that has huge implications for tire adjustment and traction, and so on.
“We strongly believe that the science we are currently applying will help us to lower the car, where we believe we have all the aerodynamic qualities.
“If we can get on this, there’s a lot of tour time we can find. If not, we need to have another idea.”
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