Lewis Hamilton may be looking at his former team with a tinge of jealousy today as Ferrari underperformed throughout the race weekend of the Australian Grand Prix. The former Mercedes driver finished in P10, two places behind Charles Leclerc.
The Monegasque will be equally as disappointed as the team failed to leverage the opportunities they had available to them in the second half of the race. The Scuderia took a gamble not pitting for tyres more fitting to the rain that eventually came, and paid the price as they dropped down the pecking order struggling on slicks.
“It was definitely a missed opportunity,” Leclerc told the media in Melbourne. “I mean, especially in those conditions when it’s changing and that you don’t have the pace, it’s there that you got to score the points and and we didn’t today.
“We just… we were not fast enough at the beginning of the race when the race was kind of boring, and then once it mattered to make the right choice, we didn’t. But the first one to blame is my mistake out of Turn 11 because this I lost four positions or five positions, I think, and from that mistake, then it puts us on the back foot.
“And if you look three or four positions in front, then we are third or fourth, which I think was what could be done. But it’s the way it is.”
Despite a solid level of optimism going into this Formula 1 season, the Scuderia team hasn’t been on the pace that was expected of them this weekend. But due to the wet conditions of the race, it’s going to be difficult for the Italian team to extract as much data as they’d like to.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
“About today I don’t think we’ve learned more than what we knew yesterday. I mean today, it’s such particular conditions that it’s very difficult to take anything out of.”
The McLarens were as fast as we expected them to be after an impressive Saturday, and after a questionable display during pre-season testing and leading up to today’s race, Max Verstappen skilfully placed his Red Bull on the second step of the podium.
“We were definitely very off in terms of pace compared to the McLarens and Max, so we’ll look into it, but yes, for sure we were struggling today and the remediate, I mean we were pretty similar to the Mercedes in front, but that was it.
“Then McLaren and Red Bull were so much faster, so there’s a lot of work to be done.”
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