Brazil was about damage minimization for Ferrari – Leclerc

Charles Leclerc views last weekend's Sao Paulo Grand Prix as an exercise in  damage limitation for Ferrari in its constructors’ championship fight against McLaren.

Lando Norris started on pole position after McLaren took a one-two in the Sprint, but a dramatic wet race ended with Max Verstappen winning from 17th on the grid and McLaren sixth and eighth. Carlos Sainz crashed out but Leclerc held Norris off for fifth in the final stages, and with Ferrari still just 36 points behind McLaren in the standings he says that’s a reasonable outcome under the circumstances.

“I think I'm partly to blame for it, because we decided set-ups together with the team and I wanted to go into that direction,” Leclerc said. “However, it was the wrong route, for sure.

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“The pace was just not there. It was in qualifying, we're happy, in qualifying, we actually weren't too bad. With the new tires, low fuel, you can extract more out of the car, but in the race we were nowhere. More than being nowhere, it was extremely difficult to drive, extremely difficult to not make any mistakes.

“At the end, looking at all this, the only thing we could be a little bit satisfied of is being in front of the two McLarens – to only lose four points in the constructors' is a big damage limitation on a weekend where they seem to be so strong. So now we need to put everything together for the last three races.”

Leclerc was one of the drivers to make an early pit stop for new intermediate tires as the entire race took place in wet conditions, but he rejoined in traffic and had his progress hampered.

“That was a mistake," he said. "It needs to be said as well that in a race like this, it's very difficult to not make any mistakes in terms of strategy, because there are so many calls that you need to do. And if you look, I think only the top three made no mistakes.

“We were on the other side of things, we stopped. I wanted free air, so I asked the team to find free air. They boxed me that lap, but unfortunately the pit entry and the pit exit time in the wet was a lot longer than what we thought. I ended up in the middle of traffic with Ollie [Bearman] and Lewis [Hamilton], and from that moment I knew that we were losing so much. And there was a Safety Car, we lost like three, four positions there.”