How Leclerc almost defied Hamilton after F1 title rivals’ Silverstone clash

There’s something about Charles Leclerc and Silverstone.

In 2015 he was a rookie winner here in European Formula 3. He made his Formula 1 weekend debut in practice for Haas at the track a year later, then in 2017 – despite a pre-race brake fire and a wing mirror falling off – he won the F2 feature race and in 2019 he charged to the F1 podium after a feisty battle with Max Verstappen. Last year, he took the awful Ferrari SF1000 to the podium amid the first race tyre drama and then was excellent again to seal fourth in the 70th Anniversary event, when no incidents befell the leaders.

In 2021, he so nearly won the British Grand Prix – his excellent form all weekend rewarded with the race lead when Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton controversially collided. He would have been a thoroughly deserving race winner even without his extra efforts coping with an ailing engine.

It just wasn’t enough to defy the resurgent, penalised world champion, but here’s the story of how Leclerc nearly scored a famous victory, which ultimately went to Hamilton – to home fan joy and Red Bull fury.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, 1st position, with the original trophy, and Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, 2nd position, on the podium

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Ferrari’s qualifying form returns

“If you look at Austria,” Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto explained after the 52-lap Silverstone race had finished, “Lando Norris was on the podium doing a fantastic race. But his race pace in Austria was very similar to ours – we were simply stuck in the traffic. Being ahead from quali and the start is key.”

Leclerc satisfied those requirements by taking best-of-the-rest in ‘normal’ qualifying – setting the fifth fastest lap and then being boosted up to fourth when Sergio Perez lost his best Q3 time for running too wide out of Stowe.

Then Leclerc had a rather lonely, if flat-out, sprint race – aided by Fernando Alonso disrupting the McLarens’ progress and Perez falling off.

"When nobody is prepared to give in, then this kind of situation can happen. But, for me, it takes two to tango" Toto Wolff

Those two excellent performances meant he lined up fourth again for Sunday’s grand prix, which immediately became third when Valtteri Bottas replicated Hamilton’s wheelspin-heavy sprint race start. So, Leclerc steamed through Abbey and Village comfortably following Verstappen and Hamilton and had an excellent view of what came next.

The championship contenders collide

Verstappen had maintained first place at the start, but Hamilton had got alongside the Red Bull by Abbey and the polesitter had to pin his car over the exit kerbs and nearly went into the runoff. They then appeared to bang wheels running down the Wellington straight, at the end of which Hamilton attacked around the outside and Verstappen scampered over the inside kerbs to cheekily run back ahead.

But this decision took him wide out of Brooklands and onto a tight line for Luffield, which meant Hamilton could take a faster, sweeping exit and surge into Verstappen’s slipstream down the national pit straight.

At Copse, the race’s pivotal moment – and the first major flashpoint of 2021’s compelling title fight – occurred.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, and Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, lead the field away at the start

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Hamilton had “really regretted not going for the gap that was down the right-hand side” of Verstappen in the sprint race, where he’d attacked to the outside on lap one, so this time dived to the Red Bull’s inside even as Verstappen had come across to cover it. This got him tight against the pitwall and three-quarters alongside at the Copse turn-in point.

Hamilton held his line. So did Verstappen. The result was sporting drama of the highest order.

The Mercedes’ left-front clipped the Red Bull’s right rear and Verstappen was sent spinning off to a 51G impact, side-on with the outside tyre barrier. From there he climbed gingerly from the wreckage, later going to Coventry hospital by helicopter for additional scans, after which he was given the all-clear.

Hamilton had been slowed enough that Leclerc shot into a sensational shock lead approaching Maggotts, with the race suspended – first by the safety car being called – by the Ferrari reaching Chapel. The race, having just entered its second lap, was then stopped for almost 30 minutes.

“With the incident with Max's car, having lost telemetry due to the size of it, neither the FIA nor the team could confirm its ERS status,” explained F1 race director Michael Masi. “So, even though the light was green, we run a super-cautious approach and send two team members out, which is within the protocols that we have to check the car to make sure that it was safe before it got recovered. And then following that was the obvious repair that had to happen to the barriers.”

Inevitably, both sides disagreed over who was to blame for the shunt.

“It just felt like a desperate move from Lewis,” said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner. “It was a left-front wheel to a right-rear contact, so that's not significantly alongside.”

“When nobody is prepared to give in, then this kind of situation can happen,” reflected his Mercedes counterpart, Toto Wolff. “But, for me, it takes two to tango.”

The car of Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, is returned to the garage on a truck

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

Leclerc aces the restart from lucky Hamilton

Hamilton’s contact with Verstappen had “failed the rim” on his left-front wheel, per Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin, which “would have been a DNF had it not been red-flagged”.

As it was, Mercedes could change Hamilton’s wheel, fit a fresh set of medium tyres and send him on his way to take the second standing start between Leclerc and Bottas. The only other damage, also fixed during the red flag, was a tyre temperature sensor on his front wing that had “got knocked loose so it was waggling”, again according to Shovlin.

When the lights went out once again, Leclerc led Hamilton away with ease, pleased his “engineers did an incredible job the last few races” so “now we have very good start performances”.

"I thought my race was over. I had quite a lot of things to do on the steering wheel but we managed the situation very well, and we managed to diminish these engine cuts for the rest of the race" Charles Leclerc

Having leapt clear, his advantage was 1.2 seconds at the end of the first full racing lap – the fourth tour. But Hamilton, hit with a 10s penalty at the start of the next lap for causing the Verstappen clash, was lurking. It was still super-fast Silverstone, scorching in the sun, with Ferrari just three races on from a French GP where Leclerc had been lapped after struggling horrendously with front tyre graining.

The question was how long he could defy a tyre management master. One he initially answered brilliantly.

Ferrari surprises itself with medium tyre pace

Given free tyre choice to start the race on any compound with the sprint race weekend format rules, all the drivers bar Perez – starting from the pitlane on the hards – had chosen the mediums for the first stint.

“On the medium we were surprisingly good,” noted Leclerc. “The car felt incredible there and we were very quick.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF21, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, and Lando Norris, McLaren MCL35M

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

How quick was demonstrated by him holding Hamilton at bay and then edging to a 2.3s lead after lap 26 of 52. Mercedes called Hamilton in on the next lap, when his badly blistered left-front was “knocked out”.

“We looked a lot in the simulators and the simulations with the drivers and the team trying to, in terms of tyre management, understand what was wrong and how to address it,” Binotto said of what Ferrari has been doing to improve its tyre preservation and wear management since Paul Ricard, although Leclerc suggested the Scuderia was still unsure exactly why it was so strong on tyre life at Silverstone. “What I'm happy and pleased to see is the progress.”

But what was additionally so impressive about Leclerc’s performance was how he coped with yet more reliability peril.

On lap 15, Leclerc reported an engine “cut”, demanding – understandably agitated considering his heartbreak in Bahrain two years ago and at home in Monaco this year – to know what was happening. An engine mapping management problem was to blame, with Ferrari having to hurriedly issue instructions on how to alleviate the intermittent power loss. Hamilton therefore closed from 1.8s at the end of lap 14 back to a low of 0.8s on lap 17, but after that – despite one more reoccurrence of the power cut – Leclerc was able to pull away again.

“I thought my race was over,” he reflected. “I had quite a lot of things to do on the steering wheel but we managed the situation very well, and we managed to diminish these engine cuts for the rest of the race.”

As Hamilton had to serve his penalty at his stop for hards, rejoining behind Norris in fourth, Ferrari could afford to leave Leclerc out for a further two laps – one tour after his team-mate, Carlos Sainz Jr, had suffered a 12.3s stop because of a wheelgun sensor problem, which did not reoccur when Leclerc arrived.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF21, makes a pit stop

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Traffic and a “snap” cost Leclerc victory

When Leclerc emerged on the hards, he had a 7.7s lead at the end of lap 30 over Bottas – who’d fallen behind Norris at the second start, in almost identical fashion to the initial getaway versus Leclerc. The Finn was then really gifted second place when a cross-threaded wheelnut on the right rear at Norris’s stop meant Mercedes immediately pulled him in to take advantage, even if he then had to briefly, successfully, battle Alonso’s Alpine on his out-lap.

But the more important gap for Leclerc on lap 30 was the one to Hamilton: 12.9s.

Over the next 19 laps, the Briton lapped an average 0.634s quicker than the leader – 0.878s faster after being ordered past Bottas at Stowe on lap 40, having already passed Norris with a rather simpler pass ahead of Copse nine tours earlier.

"My heart nearly stopped when I went up the inside because I thought the same thing was going to happen that happened to me and Max" Lewis Hamilton

“Honestly, Charles wasn’t on my mind when I came out,” said Hamilton after clinching his fourth 2021 win. “I was really trying to see if I could catch the cars ahead, just one by one. Then I saw myself catching him, but I was thinking ‘by the time I get to him my tyres will be finished at this pace’.”

But it was actually Leclerc who was having trouble with the “more fragile” hards, particularly whenever he “started to hit the traffic” as he raced on with “my engineer telling me Lewis’ pace on the hard tyres, and I was like ‘that’s quick’, I was pushing 200%”.

“Behind [the traffic], even though it was so quite far, I could feel the rear of the car was not as stable as I wanted it to be,” he added. “And this made us lose the pace a little bit that we had before.”

Halfway around lap 49 and Hamilton was within DRS range, which he used to close further in from 0.8s behind at the end of that tour on the following lap. Leclerc and Hamilton raced down the national pitstraight, and again the moment came at Copse.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF21, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“My heart nearly stopped when I went up the inside,” said Hamilton, “because I thought the same thing was going to happen that happened to me and Max.”

But this time Hamilton was fully on the apex line through the rapid right-hander and so even though Leclerc stuck to his line just as Verstappen had down so much earlier, the pair did not come close to contact. For a moment, it looked like the Monegasque driver would defy Hamilton again – at least temporarily. But suddenly the famous victory was lost, or won by Hamilton, depending on your perspective.

“I knew Lewis was in the inside,” said Leclerc. “I left a space and I think I had stayed in front, but unfortunately in the very end of the corner I got a snap [of oversteer].”

He slid left off the track and rejoined in Hamilton’s wake, the Mercedes then effortlessly pulling clear to a victory margin of 3.9s, with Bottas – minus a working drinks system for the whole hot race – 7.2s further back.

“Charles was very respectful in terms of leaving a gap,” Hamilton said of the race-winning battle. “He stayed committed and just did a wider line. He nearly kept it and that was really great racing. In that moment, I backed out at one point just to make sure that we didn’t come together. In a perfect world, that’s what would have happened in the first attempt but… different time, different place, different driver.”

Wolff reckoned Mercedes was “still a little bit down on performance” compared to Red Bull even with its upgrades, and felt “whoever is ahead [after Copse on lap one] probably drives it home”.

For this reason, as great as Hamilton was in the second stint, the moral winner of Silverstone 2021 was clearly Charles Leclerc.

“I was really on it every lap,” reflected the worthy runner-up, who didn’t think the engine cutting was the cause of his defeat. “I don’t think there is one lap where I did a big mistake. But, overall, even when everything felt good, Lewis was just much quicker than us on those hard tyres.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, 2nd position, on the podium

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images