15/06/2025
NEWS STORY
For the start, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris were the only drivers in the top ten to start on Hard, with everyone around them on Medium including Lewis Hamilton.
Tyre graining had a major impact on today's race. On lap 13 Lewis hit a small animal between turn 9 and 10, which damaged his floor and severely compromised the car's aero downforce level.
Even though, before the start, a one stop strategy could have worked for Charles, it became clear the Hard and Medium tyres wouldn't last that long, so Charles switched to a two stop. With three laps to go Norris hit team-mate Oscar Piastri and had to retire, which promoted Charles and Lewis one place higher in the classification. The race finished under the Safety Car.
Charles Leclerc: P5 was the best we could do today. We could maybe have tried to do something different with the strategy, but at the end of the day, it wouldn't have changed much for the outcome of the race. Most of all, our starting position was what put us at a disadvantage.
It's quite a specific track, so I don't think that too much of what we saw in terms of performance will carry on to the coming races. We will regroup and come back stronger.
Lewis Hamilton: P6 is a good result considering the cards we were dealt today. The car felt good in the opening laps and I was optimistic about what we could do, but unfortunately we picked up significant damage early on which cost us a lot of downforce. From that point, it was tough to manage the balance and pace, and some brake issues in the middle stint made things even harder. We're not where we need to be, but we're fully focused on the steps we need to take to compete at the front. That's our priority heading into Austria.
Fred Vasseur: I believe the main issue this weekend is that we made too many mistakes and had too many issues right from FP1, when we lost one car, then came a mistake in qualifying and in the race Lewis lost a good amount of points of downforce early on after unfortunately hitting a small animal that ran onto the track which damaged the front part of the floor. If I could replay the weekend I would choose not to have missed FP2 with one car as it meant we were unable to long stint the tyres and that was our main issue today. And that's how you end up P5 and P6. We have to take some positives from the weekend, starting with our pace in quali. Yesterday Charles had the fastest first sector before having to abort the lap and our race pace is not far off the quickest, but when you don't put everything together you find yourself in traffic. I am sure we will get a break soon, we just need a clean weekend. If we put everything together we can do it.