Charles Leclerc’s head must be spinning at the speed with which his championship fortunes have reversed in the space of just seven weeks.
Arriving in Imola he led the drivers’ championship by 34 points. Max Verstappen, clearly the Ferrari driver’s most serious threat, languished in sixth place, 46 points behind him.
Since then Verstappen has gone on a tear, winning four out of five grands prix and adding a sprint race victory to boot. He’s dropped just 12 points from an available 138.
Meanwhile Leclerc has retired twice due to car trouble and saw his Ferrari team squander more points in Monaco. He’s sunk to third in the championship, 34 points behind his rival. Verstappen has achieved an 80-point swing against him in just five races – an average of 16 points per race.
Two other statistics ram home just how badly things have gone for Leclerc. He is now just 17 points ahead of George Russell, who is working wonders with an uncompetitive Mercedes. Not only is he the only driver to have scored points in every race, he’s never placed outside the top five.
Most depressing for Leclerc, he has now started four consecutive races from pole position without winning any of them. The last driver to do that was Juan Pablo Montoya, who won none of the five races he started from pole position consecutively in 2002. Montoya chalked up seven poles that year without a single win.
Of course none of this has done any favours for Leclerc’s pole-to-win ratio, which was already the second-lowest of any driver.
In the sixth running of this race – held five times as the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and once as the ‘European’ – it has still never been won by the same driver more than once. But while Verstappen is the sixth different driver to win, Red Bull and Mercedes remain the only teams to take victories at the Baku City Circuit.
Verstappen claimed his 25th career win, giving him as many victories as Jim Clark and Niki Lauda. The Red Bull driver has started 149 races which is fewer than Lauda (171) but more than twice as many as Clark (73).
“We do more races a year,” Verstappen pointed out when told of his record after Sunday’s race. “So if you have a good car – it’s not really comparable, but it’s nice for the books.”
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