Leclerc and Ferrari bring FIGHT to Mercedes and Red Bull with incredible development

Charles Leclerc thoroughly impressed for Ferrari at the Belgium Grand Prix.

He made a clean start, led into turn one and even though he was overtaken by Sergio Perez during the first lap, he didn’t drastically lose ground on the Mexican.

He was able to keep up with Perez to within a couple of seconds without hurting his tyres – a serious compliment for Ferrari considering that they have finished below P6 for the last two races.

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“It was really important for me to finish on a high note, and we did," Leclerc said after the race. "It’s good. It wasn’t an easy race.

"The rain was there in the second stint, which didn’t make things easy. But all in all, we had the perfect management of the race “

Following what was an ultimately impressive performance from Leclerc, let's take a look at his race pace compared to that of both Perez and Lewis Hamilton.

Stint 1

The first stint was on the soft tyre for all three drivers. We can see (in the graphic below) that Leclerc is able to keep up with Perez until lap eight, after which his tyres start falling off.

Meanwhile, Hamilton is able to keep up a similar pace to the Ferrari until lap five and then starts facing tyre degradation issues similar to Leclerc. Eventually, both of them are more than 0.5secs slower than Perez by lap 11 before they pit.

Stint 2

The second stint was really interesting as it had changeable weather conditions after it started to drizzle on the track.

All three drivers were on the medium compound tyre which was looking good in terms of wear.

In this stint, Leclerc closely matched Perez’s lap-time for the majority of the stint, while Hamilton was consistently 0.2-0.5s slower than the Ferrari.

Leclerc looked like he had better control of his tyre degradation on both the soft and the medium tyres which is not a very familiar situation for the Maranello-based team to find themselves in.

Stint 3

The Third Stint has a similar storyline with Hamilton matching Leclerc for the first three to five laps and then consistently lapping 0.2-0.3s slower than him until he dedicated to pit for the extra point for fastest lap.

The real question is, why did we see this trend in Hamilton’s race pace?

Well, the answer is quite simple. Spa being a power-sensitive track meant that Hamilton chose a low-drag and low-downforce setup to be able to both hold position and overtake during the race.

However, this setup also means you wear the tyres more as there is less downforce gripping the tyre to the floor. This is especially notable in Sector 2 – which is primarily corners – and therefore the reason as to why Leclerc’s overall race pace was faster than Hamilton's.

Shubham Sangodkar is a former F1 Aerodynamicist with a Master's in Racing Car Design specialising in F1 Aerodynamics and F1 Data Analysis. He also posts aerodynamics content on his YouTube channel, which can be found here.

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