Ferrari needs "more overall grip," claims Leclerc after a strong performance in Bahrain

Having been in contention for a possible second-place finish, Charles Leclerc finished the Bahrain Grand Prix in fourth place. The mid-race safety car interruption left the Monegasque rue Ferrari's chances on a day when more was possible for the Scuderia.

Ferrari decided to start both drivers on new Medium tyres, unlike those around them that had all gone for used Softs. Starting from second, Charles Leclerc paid the price for this, losing places to George Russell and Lando Norris.

His team-mate Lewis Hamilton was running where he started in ninth place. When Oscar Piastri pitted for tyres on lap 14, Leclerc found himself in the lead with Hamilton second. The SF-25s made a double pit stop on lap 17, taking on another set of Mediums, with the Monegasque rejoining fifth, before immediately passing Pierre Gasly for fourth.

The seven-time F1 champion rejoined tenth and was immediately on the attack, catching and passing the group ahead, in the order Jack Doohan, Max Verstappen, Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Esteban Ocon, getting as high as fifth when Gasly made his second stop.

Nearer the front, Leclerc was now the fastest driver on track, to the extent he caught and passed Norris for third place. At this point, the Ferraris were on fresher rubber than those around them, which gave them a degree of flexibility when it came to how long to extend the second stint and regarding which compound to use for the final stint.

However, a collision further down the order on lap 32 brought out the Safety Car, so that everyone dived into the pits for a pit stop that cost about half the usual time. At this point, there was no option but to pit for a final time, fitting Hards to both cars to go all the way to the chequered flag, having lost any advantage of being on fresher tyres.

In the closing stages, Leclerc began to struggle on his Hard tyres and Norris, in better shape on the Mediums overtook him with five laps remaining, so that Leclerc had to settle for fourth place, three seconds down while Hamilton finished the 57-lap race in P5.

There are no regrets after a race like this, we just need to find some more pace. We pushed a bit on the first stint and the second was even faster, but once the Safety Car reset things, our pace just wasn’t good enough to fight the McLarens and George (Russell) in the Mercedes.
In general, there is not a particular type of corner where we are lacking, we just need more grip all round.

Reflecting on his race, Leclerc felt he’d done “everything” in his quest to claim a first podium of the year, but he still hopes that his upgraded SF25 will deliver an even better performance at this weekend's race in Jeddah.

"We will understand our upgrade better in Jeddah next week, I look forward to finding out what we will learn about it there. A baby step [forward] but we need many baby steps before getting to where we want.

“As I said at the beginning of the weekend we need to be cautious. We brought that upgrade here and this is not the best track to extract the maximum out of that upgrade and I’m sure that next week we will be extracting a little bit more performance out of this upgrade.”

As for the 57-lap Bahrain Grand Prix, Leclerc was left to rue his fortunes in Manama after the safety car intervention hindered his offset strategy.

“I’m a bit disappointed, at the end of the day we did everything,” he added. "The start was very tricky with the medium [tyre], we lost a lot of places and then we had to be patient.

“We went a bit longer and then it started to pay off, and then there was a Safety Car which kind of re-zeroed everything and then on the hard [tyre] we were struggling. It is a shame we lost out on the podium but I felt this was the best we could do today.

"It is disappointing because when you have so much fight towards the end, and you are fighting for a first podium of the season, and the pace is just not good enough to achieve that, so I hope that soon we will have a car in order to get back on it.

“There were different strategies that we were speaking of and one of those was the one-stop but it was definitely brave and I’m happy we didn’t do that in the end because that would have been very difficult with the Safety Car later on.”