Leclerc lacked luck until Silverstone; fortune saved him from Antonelli's charge

If there was anyone who needed a good result at Silverstone, it was Charles Leclerc. Since signing a bumper contract with Ferrari to extend his stay at the team for at least another three years, the balance of favour and fortune had not necessarily been on his side since Formula 1's travelling circus touched down in Europe. Or ever, if we want to consider his full career.

First, there was the brake issue in Monaco on the safety car restart, one that required the Antony Noghes barrier to soak up the Ferrari spillage. Then came the hydraulics issue at Barcelona, costing the Monegasque his brakes and power steering. After qualifying second at the Red Bull Ring, race pace had eluded Leclerc, to the point where he finished a distant eighth and 20 seconds behind team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

But if there's anything that defines Leclerc's career, it's this: he's a fighter. It was somewhat certain that he would bounce back, but wholly surprising that Silverstone was the venue of his rebound. Fortune had smiled upon him this time, as Ferrari was expecting a weekend of toil on its arrival in the United Kingdom. 

It helped considerably that Kimi Antonelli's late-race charge, aided by a tyre offset, was completely derailed by the break on his inside-left wheel hub. The teenager, still sitting at the top of the championship table despite a rocky recent trio of races, was scything away at Leclerc's lead; one that was feeling increasingly tenuous before the Mercedes encountered trouble. 

The final sprinkling of luck emerged when the FIA tantalisingly dangled the carrot of a final-lap shootout, once Max Verstappen's recalcitrant Red Bull had been collected from its final resting place at Stowe's gravel trap. Instead, the resumption of the race was cancelled when it emerged not all of the lapped runners were in place, causing the race to end under the safety car. Leclerc might have been a touch relieved that the safety car stayed at the head of the order for one more tour...

It's not that Ferrari's confidence was low, per se, but the team's inability to look switched on during the Austrian Grand Prix had worried it ahead of Silverstone. While Austria's race was borderline on energy consumption, as the layout of the circuit had front-loaded the deployment and made it possible to recover most of it in the second half of the lap, Silverstone's plethora of straights and high-speed corners was not a natural bedfellow for Ferrari's electrical energy systems.

The Scuderia still lacks potency in this area versus the likes of Mercedes, and Mercedes' workaround to find extra deployment at the end of the lap had only lent more credence to this performance differential. Either way, Ferrari thought it would be six tenths per lap shy of Mercedes over the Silverstone weekend. 

Antonelli found two Ferraris in front of him on the exit of the opening corner

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Hamilton had summed up the general consensus when Antonelli took pole: "We'll do our best to hold on to them, but ultimately, if [Kimi] gets a clean run, he'll be gone." From Leclerc's perspective, this was something of a worry; he'd endured a poor start to the sprint race, and slipped from fourth on the grid to seventh at the end of the opening lap. This was "a point of focus", per Leclerc, who was seeking retribution for a difficult Saturday race - and he timed the getaway perfectly on his Sunday attempt to surge past Antonelli off the line.

Hamilton joined him from around the outside into Turn 1, the Ferraris having successfully completed its pincer-movement of the current championship leader. While the home crowd might have hoped that Hamilton could press his stronger recent form into a subsequent overtake on his team-mate, Leclerc gamely built an overtake-mode buffer and put his seven-time championship-winning team-mate into the role of tail gunner. If Hamilton could delay Antonelli's recovery, Leclerc could continue to scamper up the road. It took 10 laps for Antonelli to make a move on the Barcelona winner; by this time, Leclerc was now four seconds up the road.

The scuppering of Mercedes' strategy offset

Even when in free air, Antonelli couldn't close in on Leclerc quite as quickly as he'd hoped; the Ferrari driver was making good time with his medium tyres - even versus the Mercedes. He'd extended the gap to the tune of 4.6 seconds before Antonelli started to catch him, by which time the race was easing towards its opening pit phase. 

Given the rapidly disappearing gap between the two, Antonelli was primed to take on Leclerc and wrest control of the lead

By finding only a couple of tenths on Leclerc per lap, it was evident that Mercedes would have to weaponise its pit strategy to build enough of an offset in the final stint. When presented with the plan, Antonelli was actually more concerned that he might get undercut by the likes of Hamilton, Russell, or Verstappen, although Russell was soon put out of the picture when he was informed of a slow puncture. It hardly stopped the Briton from harassing Verstappen with the boost button, even performing the F1 equivalent of leaving a tackle on his opponent before being subbed off with a robust 'pass' at Stowe seconds before pitting. 

The Bologna-born driver needn't have worried, as he was well up the road from those who'd already stopped, and who'd already lost time battling with each other. When Leclerc stopped on lap 25, Antonelli began to find enough pace to mitigate against Leclerc's laps on fresh hards. 

Leclerc emerged on track post-stop 16 seconds behind, but could only wipe out 3.5s of that gap over the next 10 laps before Antonelli followed suit and took on the hard tyre. Cut and dried, it seemed; Antonelli was 7.5s behind Leclerc when he emerged from the pits sporting his brand new Pirellis, and hacked away over a second per lap on the next three tours to leave his victory rival feeling increasingly hot under the collar.

Antonelli caught and passed Hamilton - and then had Leclerc in his crosshairs

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Progress had been slowed slightly by a virtual safety car, brought out for Nico Hulkenberg's stranded Audi, but this was a mere temporary hiccup in Antonelli's race; once full-speed racing had resumed, the gap had once more contracted to 3.6 seconds and shrinking, with Antonelli finding another 0.7s on Leclerc in the opening half of the 41st lap.

Given the rapidly disappearing gap between the two, Antonelli was primed to take on Leclerc and wrest control of the lead. With the boost in hand, it would have been easy to make the move given the tyre offset; it depends on how much Leclerc was ready to commit in defence. "With Kimi, it would have been close," Leclerc mused afterwards. "He was very fast when he was coming towards me, so it would have been very difficult to keep that first place."

"For sure, he would have caught us a couple of laps before the end," Fred Vasseur added. "Then you can't redo the race with the safety car, what's happened and so on. But on the other hand, it's not so easy to overtake. We saw when Russell came back on Verstappen or when Lewis came back on them, that to overtake you need to have the delta pace. For sure, it would have been tough."

Then, it all changed. Antonelli rattled the kerb at Copse and the inside wheel guard dislodged itself from the front-left upright, which coincided with a sudden loss in steering ability around the higher-speed corners. Antonelli was clinging on for dear life, pitting twice as Mercedes tried to diagnose the problem. To his credit, he carried on and lumbered around in the hope of keeping hold of the final point on offer, but the hopes of victory had long since disappeared into the aether.

"It looks like it's a brake duct," Mercedes' Toto Wolff explained in the aftermath. "We had taken a wheel shield, but something got stuck in there, and that's why it wasn't able to turn. Now I've seen the car, but it's not yet clear - we've got to take the whole car back to the factory in order to take it apart to really see where it happened, how it happened, and why we had so severe consequences of him not being able to turn.

"If it was me, I would have made the call [to retire]. If it was only about me, I would have made the call ten laps to the end because of safety issues. But then suspension looked OK. That's the biggest issue and he was just basically surviving from lap to lap and saying that he could do that."

Antonelli's efforts eventually came to nought as he was handed a penalty for track limits violations - ultimately a function of his damage, but the stewards felt that it was best to remain consistent. He might have overcome it, as he was actually pulling away from the 11th-placed Franco Colapinto despite the damage, but the safety car for Verstappen's gravel-trapped Red Bull compressed the order and killed off Antonelli's chances of locking down the final point.

A loose wheel guard was involved in Antonelli's sudden inability to steer his Mercedes

Photo by: Manuel Eletto / Getty Images

Verstappen appeared to suffer the same fate as he had in qualifying for Austria when he spun off at Turn 9, although he suggested that the root cause was marginally different. "A different fault, let's say, but the same outcome," he mourned. "So again, while turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching. And you lose a lot of downforce for that."

With George Russell and Hamilton on his tail, Leclerc admitted that the ending under the safety car was a fortunate eventuality. The FIA had got its announcements wrong in broadcasting the intent to resume the race for a last-lap shootout, as another lap is required by the regulations following the unlapping procedure, and the fans in attendance were disheartened to see the safety car lead the field for a final tour 

"Some backmarkers had to pass us, so I did all the safety car time at like 100, 120 kph," Leclerc said. "My tyres were completely cold, so I was very sceptical about the restart. It’s not great for the fans that are here around the track but, in the helmet, I was kind of happy that there was not a restart to keep that win. It feels really good."

It's a welcome boost to Leclerc's ambitions. He's had to face weeks of questions about his confidence and performances, particularly relative to those of Hamilton, and the braying din of criticism surely would have become difficult to ignore. Silverstone was a much-needed statement, one that silences that criticism in one fell swoop.

Although Ferrari is playing down its recent form, Mercedes is taking the Rosso Corsa cars incredibly seriously. Silverstone should have presented the Silver Arrows with a decisive win; instead, misfortune went its way and Ferrari once again capitalised. 

The Prancing Horse could count its luck at Silverstone, as it expected to struggle

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