F1
Has Leclerc lost any chance of winning the championship?
Facts : 18th of the 53 laps of the 2022 French Grand Prix. Dominant and alone in the lead while his rival for the title Max Verstappen try the undercut, Charles Leclerc loses control of his Ferrari in the double right of Beausset. A few seconds later, the Monegasque's cry pierced his radio when he noticed that he had just lost a race which had been promised to him and which ultimately fell to the Dutchman of Red Bull. So, has Charles Leclerc lost any chance of winning the championship?
Yes, by Valentin Glo
Have we ever seen a team squander so many points on their own in a title race? Between the wanderings of the pit wall and the cackling of its drivers, the Team never stops getting tripped up. This Sunday, at Castellet, Charles Leclerc was also criticizing himself after leaving 25 points in the Beausset barriers. Above all, it is a new zero point this season, the third already.
63 units. It is the delay that the Monegasque now counts on first place in the ranking after his blunder in the Var heatwave. The pilot's cry tinged with anger, rage and despair illustrated how much he blamed himself. More than the balance sheet, it is the impression left race after race by the Italian team which is hardly reassuring. Mattia Binotto may try to convince his people that they will come back stronger in Hungary, but it looks more like self-persuasion. Since its inaugural and masterful double in Bahrain, Ferrari has never again been able to produce a perfect copy. Worse, the more the season progresses, the less calm the Maranello firm seems. As if the prospect of a first Drivers' title since 2007 confused the thinking heads.
There are already only ten races left before the 2022 title is awarded and the momentum is clearly to the advantage of the Dutchman with eight podiums in the last nine races. Even when he finishes far from the box as in Great Britain, his poor performance is cushioned by a strange strategy from Ferrari: that of favoring the victory of Carlos Sainz to the detriment of its highest ranked driver in the championship, and above all the only one of the two still in the game for the world crown. There is little doubt that Charles Leclerc will learn from his mistake, but he still needs to be well surrounded. However, the little game of the moment on social networks is rather to know how Ferrari will spoil its next race. Another failure in Hungary would give the Italian clan some headaches during the summer break.
The moment Charles Leclerc lost the 2022 French Grand Prix (Photo DPPI)
No, by Jérémy Satis
We're not going to tell any stories. At Castellet, Leclerc did not really arrange his affairs with the prospect of a first world title. Especially since Max Verstappen makes few mistakes, and his 63 point lead can already seem definitive. I personally wouldn't get to work so quickly. In Melbourne, Leclerc was 46 points ahead of the Batavian. Three rounds later, he was 6 behind. These cars are still immature, and Red Bull is not immune to a reliability issue and Max is not immune to a mistake. Beyond the accounting dimension, Ferrari above all seems to have taken a constant advantage in performance over the RB18. Carlos Sainz won at Silverstone, Leclerc in Austria where Ferrari came close to a double, on a Red Bull track. In France, Charles Leclerc took pole, his 7th of the year, and was slowly distancing himself from the Dutchman, before his crash on the 18th lap.
More generally, it has been four races in a row – since Canada – that the Ferrari has been faster in the race than its competitor. there F1-75 performs well on all terrains and the Monegasque, fast everywhere, rarely makes the same mistake twice. The Scuderia is working to resolve its reliability concerns, and claims to have learned from its strategic mistakes, which it has not repeated since the Silverstone fiasco. We had never seen Mattia Binotto as optimistic as after the Paul-Ricard round. “In Hungary, the objective will not be to win, it will be to achieve a double,” he said, before recalling that Leclerc was a champion and that Ferrari would never question the confidence it has in him. In Budapest, between the absence of a straight line and the series of medium-speed turns, the Ferrari could well feel at home there. This will be the first stage of the ten races that Leclerc has left to reverse the trend!
ALSO READ > Binotto doesn't blame Leclerc after his accident: 'I'm sure he will learn'
Valentin GLO
Journalist. Endurance reporter (WEC, IMSA, ELMS, ALMS) and sometimes F1 or IndyCar.
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Vincent Moyet
28/07/2022 at 12:48 a.m.
Ferrari is a prestigious name that has won titles before, but the current team is a young team that has never won a championship and is obviously not ready for that. Instead of going from disappointment to disappointment chasing an objective which is currently not within its reach (despite a car which is certainly the best on the field), the team would do better to measure the progress that she accomplished. She is able to win again, has passed Mercedes, that is already clear progress. A second place in the final ranking for Leclerc will already be his best result and an important step in his career. Instead of putting so much pressure on themselves to constantly want to make up for previous mistakes at all costs, which leads them into this spiral of failure, the team should focus on winning races and lurking in the fight for the title when its drivers will be more seasoned in this exercise, much more difficult than achieving a few occasional triumphs, like in previous years. But be careful, because Mercedes will not sit idly by, and soon Red Bull will no longer be the only challenger for the crown.