Rough race for Ferrari, wasn't looking too bad at the start. Despite what
everyone was adamant about on tire degradation, Ferrari had pretty good tire
life, in fact people are even questioning whether Sainz should have pitted at
lap 42, with 24 laps old Mediums that would have needed to last till 34 to reach
the end, with some visible blistering on the front tires. On the other hand
Gasly managed to get to the end of the race, albeit he was lapping 2s/lap slower
than Sainz.
Leclerc made a mistake in Turn 10, at crashed out at lap 18 after a tough first
part of the race, and being able to open a gap of just about 2 seconds right
around lap 16.
Sadly there's no telemetry for lap 18 on LEC so I can't quite show a graph to
validate what happened, however Charles admitted to it being his mistake,
probably under pressure to push as hard as he could to make up for Verstappen
undercut.
Looking at these lap times it's easy to see that all the tire degradation
problems that everyone was talking about on Ferrari didn't actually exist.
Ferrari just had the engine tuned down.
It easier to see here also that Gasly got to the end with no pits, but was a lot
slower than Sainz, so hard to use it as a direct comparison, but clearly someone
did and perhaps Ferrari could have dared a bit more here, they would have gotten
lucky with the VSC if nothing else, plus they had Sainz sit behind Perez for so
long, if they wanted to pit anyway they could have done it earlier, but
ultimately nothing would have changed in that case. Sainz himself mentioned that
he asked the team to let him finish the overtake and then he would have pitted.
Lap 11 was probably the best chance for VER to pass LEC:
He had a HUGE speed advantage on that lap, 29kph between DRS and tow in the back
straight, 32kph at T1, but Ferrari was just stronger in S3 all race and was able
to keep him far enough that it never mattered. And on the straight without DRS
into T10 his top speed advantage was just 8kph, not enough to be able to pass,
compounded with the need to brake much earlier due to being so close to the car
in front that it compromises his downforce.
As soon as LEC got out of DRS range:
That top speed gap became more reasonable at 11kph with just the tow, and
looking at the performance of the car in the corners, those tires were still
very alive, compared to the Red Bull.
Sadly Ferrari today was again the better car, but when it's not reliability,
it's driver errors or strategy calls although today with the forced pit by the
SC everyone pit at the same time.
Checo and Russell had an eventful VSC ending at lap 50:
Russell created a big gap in front of him in the back straight, created enough
margin that when the restart came he was able to go quickly, about 27kph faster
than Perez who instead was still braking when Russell had the throttle down.
Nothing he could have done there, I think Perez managed his VSC badly.
I think the championship gets really hard now, everything can still happen
especially with the TD change in Belgium but as a Ferrari fan I do feel it's
probably slipping away.
