The knife-edge French GP Verstappen fight factors that led to Leclerc's costly crash

“Noooo!” The anguish in Charles Leclerc’s scream of frustration as he switched his Ferrari off for the second time while stuck in the Beausset barriers was one of a racer knowing their big chance is slipping away.

Since his Imola off chasing Sergio Perez, pretty much all of Leclerc’s shocking 2022 misfortune had been out of his hands. But his spin on lap 18 of last weekend’s French Grand Prix, ultimately won by Max Verstappen, was all his own doing. And he knew it. Leclerc was alone when everything went so horribly wrong for him at Paul Ricard. Afterwards, he typically fronted up to his own error.

In the moment that mattered most, he was adapting to a suddenly changing race situation – reacting to Red Bull’s attempt to get the previously pursuing Verstappen ahead.

Leclerc turned for Beausset from the wide line the Ferrari drivers had been using all weekend. It took him very close to the edge of the track as it had done 17 times before on Sunday. And then, the rears couldn’t take it.

Around went Leclerc – a 360-degree spin ending just as he went straight on into the barriers. There he couldn’t get his F1-75 into reverse because of “something with the clutch not working”, even after shutting it down and refiring. He turned it off for good and roared.

It wasn’t just that Leclerc’s crash and Verstappen’s victory meant the Dutchman left France with a 63-point standings lead after two races of having his lead trimmed. It was that for the sixth time out of seven races since his Miami defeat, Leclerc had lost a genuine victory shot. Only his Austria triumph pricked that timespan and such a return really doesn’t make a successful title challenge.

Thinking back to Miami in May is important in understanding how things played out as they did at Paul Ricard. The circumstances in no way absolve Leclerc of blame but do explain how he came to make such a costly error.

Leclerc vents his frustration as he climbs out of his Ferrari

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

For a start, Ferrari and Red Bull had been approaching the weekend with very different set-up philosophies.

The Scuderia was keen to avoid being defeated as it had been in America – being undone again by inferior tyre wear in sun-baked conditions. It duly stuck with a bigger rear wing and so was gaining around 6mph in the high-speed turns in practice, while also warming up its front tyres better and keeping the rears in shape with reduced sliding over a qualifying flier.

Over a stint, Ferrari’s extra downforce (boosted by its forward floor reprofiling for this event) was also aimed at reducing low-speed understeer and so helping tyre life at a front-limited track.

Red Bull, meanwhile, was allying the potent punch of its rebadged Honda engine with its low-drag aerodynamic profile.

At the earliest opportunity, the pressure was on Leclerc. The pair exchanged then fastest laps in the low 1m38s before the pace slipped away slightly – all while Verstappen remained at a maximum of 0.8s behind for the next five laps, during which he got to 0.6s behind at the end of lap seven and had a real go attacking at Beausset

This was to try and negate Ferrari’s corner-speed advantage in qualifying and then keep Verstappen safe from straightline attack if he got pole. When he didn’t, the straightline advantage would keep him in DRS range and force Leclerc to eat up his tyres pushing in the corners a la Miami. It would also aid defending if Verstappen managed to get ahead, but all the while would require careful steering inputs in the high-speed turns.

When Leclerc had easily led away from pole, Verstappen had been under greater pressure from the fast-starting Lewis Hamilton before the Red Bull driver braked latest of all three leaders for Turn 1. That got him close to Leclerc, but never enough to threaten the Monegasque’s lead and so the season’s dominant pair shot clear of the Mercedes in tandem on lap one of 53.

At the end of that tour, Leclerc’s lead was 1.1 seconds. He increased that to 1.3s the next time around, but Verstappen got close enough on lap three that he could use freshly activated DRS to pull firmly within the critical window and stay there.

At the earliest opportunity, the pressure was on Leclerc. The pair exchanged then fastest laps in the low 1m38s before the pace slipped away slightly – all while Verstappen remained at a maximum of 0.8s behind for the next five laps, during which he got to 0.6s behind at the end of lap seven and had a real go attacking at Beausset.

Leclerc and Verstappen looked set for an intense fight for French GP victory after the opening laps

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The pressure seemed to be working as many had expected pre-race. Leclerc’s rear was sliding and he was struggling to stay on the road through the high-speed Turns 3/4 chicane and at the subsequent quick left-right complex midway down the Mistral straight.

But from there, the gap began to creep up. Verstappen was suddenly the one sliding more – going fully off-track at the tricky Turn 6 right that feeds into the Turn 7 kink and the straight beyond on lap nine. This earned him a track limits violation warning from engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, to which he replied: “Tyres are just hot – I'm really stuck here.”

Over the next six laps, Leclerc’s advantage stretched out to 1.8s as Verstappen continued to struggle at Turn 6, after which Red Bull called Verstappen in – although only if Leclerc stayed out. After a typically swish turnaround (2.4s), Verstappen was on his way armed with fresh hards and Leclerc seemingly snookered given the undercut’s considerable power here.

“By halfway around the [out-] lap, he had track position,” said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner.

Ferrari reacted decisively to Verstappen’s stop, with Leclerc’s engineer Xavier Marcos quickly telling him the team “confirmed” the Plan B it had been mulling a few laps earlier. This would involve eking out a tyre-life offset against Verstappen, with which Leclerc would be forced to make a race-winning pass in the second stint that never came.

Red Bull had come into the race “leaning towards two stops,” per Horner. But several factors added up to mean it and Ferrari were set to only make one – albeit at different stages.

The first was that the medium tyres all the leaders had started on were holding up “better than expected in these [hot] conditions”, according to Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola.

This was down to the track gripping up with additional support series rubber going down compared to its FP2 state. There, Ferrari had been a shocking near half-second off Verstappen’s long-run pace average on the same compound.

Set-up choices to reduce the slow-speed understeer also minimised the strain on the left-fronts – critical at this venue. And Leclerc insisted after qualifying that his FP3 long run work on the hards had confirmed Ferrari’s overnight data-crunching efforts had resulted in a “significant step up in performance” on race pace.

Ferrari had successful altered Leclerc's set-up to negate the practice pace deficit to Red Bull

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

The other critical factor in the lead fight strategy was the FIA’s decision to effectively lengthen the pitlane compared to the last three races here by moving the limiter release point to be level with the furthest point of the track’s last pit complex building.

This had been done as the previous position was ahead of several garages the F1 organisation had been using over the weekend – at one point holding the 1922 Aston Martin 'Green Pea' Sebastian Vettel had driven last Thursday – and the officials were worried. The fear was a suddenly accelerating car could be spun towards the garages and potentially injure those working nearby.

The pitlane exit speed line repositioning added an extra 6-7s, enough, said Verstappen, to reduce “opportunities in terms of racing” as “a two-stop was just slower because of the length of the pitlane”.

It was ultimately academic, but with the race lead fight poised on a knife-edge one and a half laps after Verstappen came in both leading teams claimed to be in the ascendency.

"The second half of the race would have been the opposite of the first. Where we would have had track position, Ferrari would have had a slightly younger tyre advantage" Christian Horner

“I stayed in his DRS for quite a while, but around here even driving on your own the tyres are already getting really hot,” said Verstappen. “That's why he pulled away a little bit.”

Horner explained: “Unfortunately we couldn’t get close enough through Turn 6 onto the straight to really capitalise on the DRS [early on]. Therefore, that’s why we banked the track position [by stopping first].

“The second half of the race would have been the opposite of the first. Where we would have had track position, Ferrari would have had a slightly younger tyre advantage.”

Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto insisted that his squad “had an edge on the Red Bull in terms of tyre degradation”. This was even though Leclerc’s front left that had blistered in what Isola calls the “the first time we’ve seen this kind of blistering” in F1’s 18-inch wheel era.

Verstappen had already been in favour of a one-stopper due to the pitlane extension which meant more time lost in a stop

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“Looking at the time where Max stopped,” Binotto continued, “he was starting suffering from tyre degradation. Charles was gaining two or three tenths per lap on him.”

The evidence rather supports Ferrari’s claims. Isola stated that “the blistering was not effecting” Leclerc’s lap times and indeed he was going metronomically in the high 1m38s in the laps before he crashed.

When Ferrari had asked Leclerc for a front wing flap adjustment assessment for whenever he would stop, he proclaimed it was “OK like this” – happy enough with the balance to execute his team’s tyre management plan. Verstappen, however, had his left-front “giving up”, so need “a little more front wing” at his service. He’d also had to be warned by Lambiase to “watch that steering input in the high-speed, as we've been through”.

But even if things were “under control” on tyre wear according to Leclerc, as he immediately acknowledged, “probably not enough because I went off and put the car in the wall”.

The differing downforce levels, the tension of the early exchanges and the state of Leclerc’s tyres thereafter, plus Red Bull applying additional pressure through an aggressive strategy call – “it was the earliest that we felt was on the limit for the one-stop”, per Horner – all of it led to the Leclerc’s crash.

“It’s been a very tricky balance all the weekend,” he said of his car performance just before he crashed, when he’d just been asked to preserve his ageing mediums, which had already been tortured plenty with that early rear sliding.

“I like to have oversteer, but whenever there is heat it makes it difficult to be consistent. I’ve not been very consistent and I’ve paid the price of doing one big mistake during the race.”

The safety car was called to cover Leclerc’s car finally being extracted from the Beausset barriers. This presented a moment of danger for Verstappen, as the four cars ahead that had yet to stop would gain 11s in pitstop time if they pitted immediately.

Leclerc's Ferrari is moved behind the barrier after his crash from the lead

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Hamilton and the rest duly did so to likewise take hards, but Verstappen was able to get ahead of his former title foe before the second safety car line. When the race restarted on lap 21, Verstappen nailed the restart – already 0.9s clear by the time they were back up to racing speed.

“He was just so fast,” said Hamilton, who came home 10.6s behind Verstappen – the pair unruffled to the flag, other than having to negotiate the virtual safety car period that followed Zhou Guanyu stopping in the Turn 6 runoff with an engine issue on Verstappen’s 49th lap. Although this was ultimately elongated, there was no sense in either stopping.

“I was kind of keeping with him for like two laps and then… But literally I’m full gas down the straight and he's pulling away. If I pushed any more maybe I wouldn't have seen the end of the race.”

The main reason why Hamilton also had a simple race to the finish behind the dominant new leader was because of the fluctuating fate of the other Red Bull.

Perez, having had Hamilton rocket by at the start, had pressured the Mercedes early on before falling back to a 3.1s deficit by the time of Leclerc’s crash.

He was struggling “a little more this weekend with deg than we’ve seen previously,” reckoned Horner. Perez felt this was being caused by him “struggling with the full balance” through corner exits, so hurting his rear tyres in addition to the demands on the fronts.

"He was just so fast. I was kind of keeping with him for like two laps and then… I'm full gas down the straight and he's pulling away" Lewis Hamilton

For the nine laps after the restart, Perez was still able to comfortably run clear of George Russell in the second Mercedes – the Briton having immediately cleared Lando Norris with a swooping move at the race’s first corner and soon clearing the fast-starting Fernando Alonso too. But then Perez’s pursuer became Carlos Sainz.

The second Ferrari had started 19th because of its new engine being fitted for Saturday’s running and had steadily worked his way up to ninth by the safety car. Sainz had started on the hards, which provided Ferrari with data to feed to Leclerc and gave him a contra-strategy to attack on the mediums when on low fuel later.

That was ruined by the safety car, as it meant Sainz was far from certain to take the mediums 35 laps to the finish. Plus, while getting them, Sainz had been saddled with a five-second time addition after he was released into Alex Albon’s path having had his right-front wheelnut needing checking.

Perez couldn't match the pace of Verstappen in the sister Red Bull and ended up fighting Sainz and Russell as the race progressed

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Sainz nevertheless repassed Daniel Ricciardo into Turn 1 at the restart, then got Norris seven corners later and Fernando Alonso on the next lap. Sainz pursued Russell for eight tours before getting a great run onto the second half of the Mistral straight and then pulling off a stunning around-the-outside move through the rapid Signes right.

After this, he chomped into Perez’s advantage – reducing it from 2.6s to 0.8s in six laps. As he was doing so, Ferrari was, per Binotto, “trying to extend his stint as much as possible to have the best [assessment of] the tyre's life”.

Both team and driver dithered on whether to come in or not, but Ferrari’s decision to ask engineer Riccardo Adami to call Sainz in on lap 41 – just as he was harassing Perez on the outside of the long Turn 13 right before finally getting ahead with neat lunge at the final corner – was baffling.

Then, even more initially bizarrely, Ferrari insisted he stop at the end of the following tour. This all but ensured a fifth-place finish as, even though Sainz was coming back towards the podium by 1.9s each time in the final phase even as he repassed the McLarens and Alonso, his 30.4s post-second-stop deficit was just too great and the VSC timing unhelpful.

“We realised that there was not sufficient tyre life to go to the end of the race – as simple as that,” said Binotto. “And to stay out would have been a risk in terms of safety and reliability in terms of tyres life. More than that, I think that Carlos’ pace would not have been sufficient to open the gap more than five seconds to Perez and Russell, to somehow cover the penalty.”

Russell had followed Sainz’s Perez pursuit and was close enough on the lap after the Ferrari had got ahead running onto the pitstraight – Sainz temporarily sealing third with DRS on the inside run to Turn 1 – to mount an immediate assault.

With his own DRS activation, Russell divebombed Perez into the Turns 8/9 chicane. When Perez turned in, the pair clashed at the first apex and the Red Bull cut the second to remain ahead.

Perez kept hold of third place despite running off track in a fight with Russell but it wouldn't last

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Russell fumed he had been “front wheel to rear wheel – that’s the rule”, which only really entitled him to racing room anyway. The stewards’ assessed the incident did not even warrant a full investigation and so it was on Russell, in the words of Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, to “hunt him down”.

He did so, but only got ahead in yet more bizarre circumstances.

During the Zhou-stoppage-triggered VSC on lap 50, the system hardware in race control crashed – just after the suspension had been set to end. The back-up system kicked in but had to resend the “VSC ending” message – meaning the drivers were left waiting 54s instead of the 10-15s defined in the rules.

Perez had been expecting the VSC to end “out of Turn 9, so I went for it and then it didn’t end”. Instead, he’d made it to Turn 13 when the green flags flew, at which Perez lit up his rears and slid, and Russell “just gunned it” – pouncing superbly to get alongside his rival and then past ahead of the penultimate corner.

Although Leclerc’s error made the story of the day, it belonged to Verstappen, who remained rational through the celebrations

Perez and Horner queried the system glitch, but the FIA insisted via a post-race statement “the same information is supplied to all teams concurrently”.

Russell had three laps to hold on to share the podium with Hamilton for the first time as Mercedes team-mates – 300 races after the driver he’d met as a young karter had taken his F1 bow in 2007. Russell duly did so, leading to jubilant scenes at Mercedes, with Wolff explaining his pre-VSC radio intervention was because he felt Russell was “a little bit stuck in a loop of being upset about the situation”.

But, although Leclerc’s error made the story of the day, it belonged to Verstappen, who remained rational through the celebrations accompanying his seventh win of the campaign.

“Of course, the lead we have is great,” he reflected. “But it's probably a bit bigger than what it should have been when you look at the car performances between the two cars…”

Verstappen now holds a 63-point lead in the F1 standings over Leclerc, with Red Bull 82 points up on Ferrari in the constructors'

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images