F1: Leclerc Paul Ricard Crash Mirrors Vettel’s Ferrari Struggles In 2018

The last time Ferrari truly had a car that could challenge for the world championship was in 2018. Like the 2021 season, that year Sebastian Vettel won the first race of the season, in a seemingly dominated Ferrari, but the pressure got to him and his team and the world championship was more or less over by the Mexican GP when Lewis Hamilton wrapped up his 5th world title and 4th one for Mercedes. Charles Leclerc who is Ferrari’s main challenger this year is somewhat experiencing the same Ferrari pressure against a rather cool Max Verstappen and his crash in Paul Ricard was a culmination of the pressure that has been piling up.

After the first three races, Leclerc led the world championship by more than 40 points and now he trails Verstappen by 63 points. With just 10 races left, he basically needs a miracle. It is a combination of Ferrari’s strategic errors, its reliability issues and the relentlessness of Verstappen that’s caused this. And this is not a new story, in fact, it is an old and familiar one that has been the undoing of not one but numerous world champions who have joined the Scuderia since the heyday of Michael Schumacher.

Leclerc is a gifted driver. He is someone who Vettel himself described as the most gifted one he drove against. But he is also young and bares the burden of Ferrari not having won anything in F1 in 14 years. And Ferrari doesn’t help a mighty task but rather his team often has made decisions which have made the task harder.

The mixup for the pit stop during his home race, the coveted Monaco GP should’ve been avoided. Instead of a win in his home race where overtaking is next to impossible, Ferrari found a way to hand Verstappen the victory and Leclerc managed just P4. In Silverstone, Leclerc shouldn’t have been battling his teammate Carlos Sainz Jr and he, despite the damage, was the faster of the two, and yet the advantage was handed to the Spaniard and Leclerc again lost on points.

Even in Austria during the first sprint race — Leclerc duelled his teammate rather than chasing Verstappen and he ended up dropping a point. On top of this, the two engine blow-ups in Baku and Spain while leading the race are all adding up to the pressure Leclerc has to deal with.

At the Red Bull pit garage, Verstappen is the undisputed no.1 despite having a seasoned operator in Perez alongside him. Ferrari’s indecisiveness in strategy is proving to be again the core of its downfall. Even when Vettel was the leader at Ferrari often Raikkonen his teammate would be left ahead of him while he lost time in dirty air against a charging Hamilton.

And Ferrari is not only messing up things for Leclerc these days, it is making things tough for Sainz as well. The difference is that Sainz is more experienced than Leclerc and has driven for Renault and McLaren, both big teams in their own right and has been more assertive with the pit garage which has resulted in him getting the better strategy.

In Germany 2018, Vettel crashed at his home race and was seen completely distraught after the race. He never really recovered from that and was handily beaten by Leclerc in 2019 and 2020. Could this be Leclerc’s fate? One hopes this is not the case and clearly he is up there with Verstappen and Hamilton in race pace. He is arguably better than the two in qualifying.

But Ferrari’s indecisiveness and reliability issues are surely getting to Leclerc’s head.