Ferrari has explained how no restricted data on the Hard tyre saw Charles Leclerc play an “important role” in the one-stop that won him Formula 1’s Italian Grand Prix.
Leclerc managed to execute an audacious 38-lap stint on the hardest compound to overcome the two-stopping McLarens to triumph on Ferrari’s home soil at Monza.
The Monegasque, who started fourth, passed George Russell at Turn 1 and then capitalised on the squabbling McLaren drivers at Turns 4/5 to overtake Lando Norris.
Norris got back ahead when McLaren triggered an undercut, but Leclerc regained the two spots when the Briton and team-mate Oscar Piastri stopped a second time.
Leclerc had enough pace in hand in the closing stages to come home with a 2.6-second advantage over Piastri’s McLaren to a rapturous applause in the grandstands.
Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur expressed surprise with how hard the McLaren duo pushed in the opening laps, which ended up pushing both drivers onto the two-stop.
“I’m trying on the pit wall to avoid thinking if it’s possible or not, that we are managing the gap, we are giving target lap time to the drivers and not to think too much if it’s possible or not.
“But it’s true that the race was quite strange because we started for one stop and then McLaren pushed a bit more than expected on the first stint.
“Norris struggled before us that he had to pit, we wanted to cover him and to stay in the same race as them because we had the feeling that we had an advantage on the tyres.
“But the advantage was so good that after 10 laps with the Hard it was clear for us that we could go until the end.
“Then you never know because you can have a cliff at one stage, but it was not the case.
“It was pretty well managed by the two guys and at the end of the day they were able to achieve the target lap time each lap and very consistently.”
Vasseur has admitted that he became certain that Leclerc had the race covered once it approached the last lap and he had a sizeable margin intact over the McLaren.
“We are doing the calculation on what we could give up to Piastri each lap and to fix some target to Charles,” he recalled.
“Just in the last lap I said, ‘OK now we are safe’, because for the last lap we had something like four seconds and then you start to think about reliability.
“But now we are starting to try to stay focused, it’s not always easy but it’s the most important and not to think too much about the podium and so that this is a mistake.”
The Frenchman has credited the integral part Leclerc held in providing the potential to open up the one-stop option amid the pitwall’s limited information on the Hard.
“It’s the tricky side of this kind of race that when you don’t have so much data on the tarmac and so you don’t long stint at all the Hard before the rest,” he elucidated.
“I think only [Yuki] Tsunoda did a long stint with the hard on Friday morning, but it was not representative and it was too early into the weekend.
“Then we had to take the decision to save two Hard for the race.
“It means that we arrived on Sunday afternoon and you have no data, no clue about the wear, the potential and the degradation.
“And it’s more where the drivers have to play an important role on the first lap of the stint to give their feedback also to the pitwall and this went pretty well for us.”
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