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Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc believes the Italian outfit must learn from rivals Red Bull when it comes to race strategy following an ill-fated tyre gamble.
Leclerc and team-mate Lewis Hamilton started Sunday's race in changeable weather conditions on soft slick tyres. In contrast, Red Bull duo Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar opted for intermediate tyres, which proved far better suited to the damp track surface.
The Scuderia's gamble quickly backfired. Hamilton tumbled down the order from second to 15th, while the Monegasque driver dropped from fourth to the tail of the field after being forced to pit at the end of the opening lap following contact with Nico Hülkenberg.
Ferrari's strategic decisions have long been a talking point in the paddock. While the team occasionally nails the right approach, they frequently make costly errors. Red Bull, meanwhile, continue to showcase tactical brilliance under Principal Strategy Engineer Hannah Schmitz. At the Sepang circuit, Verstappen converted pole position into his 72nd career victory.
“I was fully on board with the team's decision,” Leclerc admitted. “In conditions like these, the call is always on a knife's edge, and we will discuss whether splitting the strategy between the two cars would have been the better option. However, it is true that when you split strategies, usually one choice turns out completely wrong and the other brilliant, with rarely a middle ground where both yield a similar outcome. We thought we were doing the right thing, but it is abundantly clear that there is one team—Red Bull—that almost always gets it spot on with both cars. We need to understand what they are doing better than us,” the driver added.
Ferrari were among six teams to start on slicks, but only the Maranello-based squad and Alpine—with Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto—decided against splitting strategies, fitting soft compounds to both cars. Conditions proved exceptionally tricky after early rain gave way to a rapidly drying line, and by lap 13 the entire field had transitioned to dry-weather rubber.
“It was extremely difficult and the same for everyone,” Leclerc added. “Although we had data, it was collected in completely different conditions. We made the call based on intuition and inspecting the track surface, which looked fairly dry. The major issue was how much water remained trapped in the crevices of the asphalt—it turned out to be significantly more than most expected, making slicks the wrong choice. The end result is quite representative of where we expected to finish. Kimi (Antonelli) and Max were too strong for us today, and we slotted in right behind them in third and fourth. It was a bizarre race—everything that could go wrong in the first half did, but in the second stint everything fell into place perfectly. In the end, the two extremes cancelled each other out, and we finished where we belonged, even if we had to sweat far more than expected,” Leclerc concluded.
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