Why Leclerc's Race Winning Pace Disappeared Explained

Charles Leclerc looked in a fantastic position to win the Hungarian Grand Prix. After taking a surprising pole position on the Saturday, he controlled the opening stint of the race, ahead of Oscar Piastri. Leclerc's pace was strong enough to defend from the McLaren, and even when Piastri was asked to close up during the first round of pitstops, the best that he could get was within 2.5 seconds of Charles Leclerc. After the pitstops, Leclerc came out comfortably ahead of Piastri, and it honestly looked that if Leclerc could just cover everything that Piastri was doing on the strategy side, he had the pace and the straight-line performance to win the Hungarian Grand Prix. However, immediately after the first round of pitstops, Leclerc's pace started to really decline, and then after the second pitstop, it basically fell off a cliff. He started complaining over the radio of an issue which they discussed before the race, but he was very cryptic as to what exactly the issue was. These radio messages continued as Leclerc became more and more frustrated, and his pace got even worse. After the second round of pitstops, Piastri overtook Leclerc as it became very clear that his chances of winning were now completely gone. Ferrari's advantage in the race and in qualifying came from their setup. Unlike McLaren, they chose to run a lower downforce setup to give them better straight line speed, but to make up for the loss of grip, mechanically they risked running the car lower to the ground to make up the downforce. After qualifying, even Autosport reported that Leclerc's big advantage was his straight line speed, saying that in sector 1 alone, compared to Piastri, Leclerc was 7kmh quicker into T1, and 10kmh quicker into T4. This balance made the Ferrari strong enough during the first stint to the point where Piastri couldn't even get close to Leclerc on the straights, and couldn't even get close to try to overtake him. Ferrari however made a massive misjudgement. Leclerc during the first stint with the car heavy with almost 100kg of fuel, was scraping along the ground a lot more than they expected, and Ferrari started to be worried that the car was being run too low and that the plank wear was going to be too high. At maximum speed, your car is experiencing the most amount of load which also does the most damage to the plank if you're running too low. Ferrari realised that if they didn't make any changes during the race, even though Leclerc had the pace to win the race, most likely the plank wear would be too high and potentially he was looking at a disqualification maybe even from a race winning position. This is exactly what happened to both of the drivers in China, and Ferrari just could not run the risk of that happening again. During the pitstops onto the hard tyres, Ferrari had to take preventative measures. First they instructed Leclerc to reduce his engine modes to decrease his top speed down the end of the straight, and most importantly, they raised the tyre pressures on the hard tyres to raise the car. This is something that even the other team started to notice when Leclerc's drop off became so dramatic, with George Russell after the race saying I saw how slow he was so I presumed something was not right. The only thing that we can think of is they were running the car too low to the ground and had to increase the tyre pressures for the last stint because they were using an engine mode that was making the engine a lot slower at the end of the straight, which is where you have the most amount of plank wear. Boosting the tyre pressures had a catastrophic effect on the car's straight line performance, and more importantly, its tyre wear. The car's setup works best when the downforce levels, the mechanical platform and the tyres, all work in tandem. Raising the pressures beyond what they didn't work with the level of downforce and mechanical grip that Ferrari had chosen and took the car out of its operating window. Raising the car helped to alleviate the plank wear issue, but with less downforce, the tyres were now overheating a lot quicker and there was now significantly less grip. And now a lot of people think that if you have more downforce, then that also equals more tyre wear, but that is actually not true. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but if you look at the best cars in Formula 1, like the McLaren for example, the more downforce you have, it allows you to rotate your car a lot more efficiently and a lot more easier through the corners because less of the work is being done by the steering and throttle. That in turn stresses the tyres a lot less and improves your tyre wear. If you then have less downforce, then more of the work is being done with the steering when you're applying a little bit more steering angle to turn the car and more work is done with the throttle on corner exits when trying to manage the traction. All of that means that the tyres are being worked a lot harder through the same corner which in the end causes tyres to overheat and also wear more. Something else that potentially could have compounded the issue was the fuel. Now usually over time, as the fuel burns off, as your car gets lighter and as the track rubbers in, even though you're having to deal with tyre wear, you should get quicker as the race progresses. For Leclerc however, as the fuel burned off and as the car got lighter, which should have been a good thing, because of his boosted pressures, the car got even higher than Ferrari anticipated which meant he was losing even more downforce as the race progressed which made his pace get progressively worse when it should have got progressively better. And now if we take a look at the times of Leclerc, Piastri and Russell throughout the race. At the beginning of the race and during the first stint and even the beginning of the second stint, it was kind of a match with all four drivers. They were all kind of hovering in that 1 minute 22 mark but the moment we get to the second half of the race, you can see that even with a few traffic and inconsistent laps, the likes of Norris, Russell and Piastri all got quicker as the race progressed as their times dropped to about a 1 minute 20. Whilst with Leclerc, he actually got slower in the second half of the race when his car should have been a lot lighter and a lot quicker and he was actually going slower at the end of the race than he was at the beginning of the race when he had almost 100 kilograms of fuel on board. This is the frustration that we heard over the radio during the race as Leclerc saw that his rivals were just getting quicker and quicker and as his car just got worse and worse. After the race, he did retract some of the things that he said over the radio because in reality the team wouldn't have known that the car would be wearing its plank as much as it did until they saw how bad it was during the opening stint. First of all, I need to take back the words I said on the radio because I thought that it was coming from one thing and then I got a lot more detail since I got out of the car and it was actually an issue coming from the chassis and nothing we could have done differently. I started to feel the issue on lap 40 or something and it got worse lap after lap after lap. Towards the end we were 2 seconds off the pace and the car was just undriveable. I thought it was from a change we did on the front wing during the pitstop, being too aggressive, but then of course it got a lot worse and then it seemed a bit off to me. This caps off a frustrating weekend on both sides of the garage where both of the drivers had to kind of deal with plank wear yet again. Ferrari pushed the limits of its setup too much in search of ultimate performance and not only was it a mistake but it was also incompetence. Once the car was locked into Parc Ferme for qualifying, Leclerc's fate for the rest of the weekend was essentially doomed from that point onwards. It was desperation from Ferrari because they were pushing the mechanical platform so much in terms of performance that they got greedy. Even when it comes to Lewis, both of the Ferrari drivers this season have to do more lifting coast than any other team on the grid, also to prevent the car from scraping at top speed down the end of the straights, which again is down to preventative plank wear. If the car naturally had more downforce, then they wouldn't need to run the risk of running it so low but, just like in China, they clearly still don't have a comprehensive understanding of how to get the best compromise between the setup and ride height to give them the fastest car on the Saturday, a car which will have the best possible race time on the Sunday but will also still be legal at the end of the race when it comes to plank wear. Well, there you have it. If you did enjoy this video then don't forget to subscribe, that would be massively appreciated and I'll see you in the next one.