The mistakes putting Ferrari's bid to end its F1 title drought in jeopardy

We will get to the power unit failure in Spain and the strategy clangers of Monaco soon enough. Those high-profile Ferrari blunders that have hurt the team and Charles Leclerc’s title designs so severely have rightly been front and centre over the past fortnight.

But in truth, the Scuderia’s best efforts to create its own downfall have been on display for the last four rounds now. And as each race has passed, the cost of the errors has only increased.

In the Bahrain curtain-raiser, prior to the double Red Bull retirement, Leclerc had outwitted Verstappen in their DRS activation dice. Max Verstappen got his own back in Saudi Arabia as the high-speed Jeddah street circuit suited the top-end performance of the rebadged Honda engine. Again, prior to Verstappen’s RB18 letting go, Leclerc was in total command of proceedings to win in Australia before a home race for Ferrari at Imola beckoned.

The persistent rain on the Friday of the Emilia Romagna weekend washed the track surface to present Ferrari with a tyre graining headache throughout the sprint contest and proper grand prix. A poor launch from the sodden side of the grid on Sunday was neither driver nor team error especially, as Verstappen assumed control. But it was Ferrari that dropped the ball with a slow Leclerc pitstop that bled away 1.4s and effectively cemented Sergio Perez in second. Then, of course, it was certainly a driver error when Leclerc span over kerbs to eventually classify down in sixth.

In preparation for the inaugural Miami GP, Leclerc gave himself a leg up by landing pole by two tenths over his team-mate as Verstappen lined up third. Carlos Sainz did what he could from the unfavoured side of the grid but was powerless to resist a lightning launch from the defending champion.

With Verstappen in pursuit and Ferrari’s tyre degradation bad habits on the softer compounds lingering, Leclerc was left exposed to swiftly fall to second place. But no matter. The immensely long Floridian back straight and sweeping second sector meant that the first Stateside trip of the campaign was likely going to favour Red Bull anyway, so the points dropped were palatable before Ferrari could fight back with its low-speed prowess.

Leclerc lost out to Perez through the pit sequence in Imola, then spun trying to make ground back

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Leclerc avoided embarrassment at Barcelona by bouncing back after his early Q3 spin at the chicane to nail pole. And almost certainly after Verstappen ran over the Turn 4 gravel after his rear-end lose, the Monegasque had that race well and truly wrapped up before his engine expired.

So, even if you are charitable and consider the points dropped in Imola to be entirely down to driver error and that second place in Miami was the ceiling for Leclerc given the traits of the Ferrari and Red Bull, at the very least a win had been blown by the Scuderia in Spain.

Perhaps you might consider the retirement at Barcelona as a bit of overdue unreliability for Leclerc to balance the books against Verstappen’s two DNFs (at Sakhir and Melbourne) plus less costly clutch (Imola), overheating (Miami) and DRS (Barcelona) gremlins. But what transpired in Monaco last weekend is far harder to let slide.

PLUS: The six key moments that meant Perez won Leclerc's Monaco GP

Ferrari’s gutsy engine meant a fifth pole for Leclerc and a second front-row lockout of the term. But amid the wet-weather chaos, the strategists dressed in red were much too reactionary in their attempts to protect the win. That allowed Perez, running in a distant third, to make his switch to intermediate tyres two laps earlier than Leclerc, while Verstappen covered off the lead Ferrari by pitting at the same time.

"We got undercut then I stopped behind Carlos. There have been a lot of mistakes and we cannot afford to do that" Charles Leclerc

Perez’s earlier stop put him on a powerful undercut. He teamed a decent out-lap with another tour that was a brutal seven seconds faster than Leclerc as the track conditions changed to effectively leapfrog into the lead. Having been caught out, Ferrari then came across overzealous by stopping Leclerc again for slicks just three laps later. Too short a window to offset the damage done by adding an extra visit to the garage.

Only adding to Leclerc’s bubbling anger, he was told to pit and then stay out as the pitwall panicked. As the win slipped away, little wonder Leclerc resorted to expletives - the colourful language arriving after Ferrari had already frustrated its driver by mixing up its pit entry call in FP1 when Mick Schumacher stopped, plus having cheesed off Leclerc further in Q1 and Q3 by sending him out into traffic. Then delaying him behind Sainz with a double-stack pitstop did little to alleviate the ire.

As a home hoodoo struck again, Leclerc didn’t hide his chagrin during the Schumacher-induced red flag. Shaking his head, hitting the dashboard, marching up the pit lane, waving his hands. He knew what his team had let slip, some 40 laps before the chequered flag eventually flew.

Even before the race had restarted in Monaco, Leclerc was already resigned to the outcome after Ferrari's tyre strategy blunder

Photo by: Ferrari

Leclerc’s verdict was: “We got undercut then I stopped behind Carlos. There have been a lot of mistakes and we cannot afford to do that. We are extremely strong now, the pace is strong, we need to take these opportunities, we cannot lose so many points like this, it is not even from first to second, it is from first to fourth, because after the first mistake we did another one.”

Spain and Monaco were readymade for Ferrari to end Verstappen’s momentum. Instead, even though the Dutch racer was a quiet third, it has thrown away a win and a 1-2 in successive races to lose the lead of both championships.

If this were football, the manager would now have a tough choice on their hands: either drop the standout performer from the early part of the season for a string of bad games or persist, keep starting them, and hope the player can work themselves back into good form by making sure they remain in the thick of it.

Ferrari doesn’t have either choice now. It certainly can sit out a race and has all but lost the luxury of time to get things right. The campaign is now almost a third of the way through and Ferrari's best chance to end the 14-year wait for another championship trophy is under serious threat.

The performance unlocked in Spain courtesy of a significant upgrade remains a cause for optimism. But now the team heads to Azerbaijan and Canada, where Red Bull is expected to be on top, with rather damp powder after being exposed by indecision at a wet Monaco.

On a rare off-weekend for Verstappen, the Dutchman still outscored Leclerc in Monaco

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images