Ferrari cannot ignore triggers of mid-season F1 slump

The Monegasque driver made the most of Ferrari’s strong start to the 2022 campaign as he won two of the opening three grands prix.

However, the combination of a resurgent Red Bull, plus reliability and strategy struggles at Maranello allied to driver errors led to derailing Ferrari’s title hopes.

All of this has been pushed further into the spotlight following Ferrari’s announcement on Tuesday that team boss Mattia Binotto would be leaving his post at the end of the year.

Reflecting on the season as he ended up finishing runner-up to world champion Max Verstappen, Leclerc said there was plenty of encouragement to take from the fact that Ferrari had made good progress with the pace of its car.

However, he was mindful that Ferrari needed to look closely at the problems it faced in the middle part of the campaign.

“Obviously, if I take a step back, considering from how far we come from last year, it’s an amazing step forward,” he said, speaking before the news of team boss Mattia Binotto’s departure emerged.

“But obviously I cannot ignore our middle part of the season that has been super-frustrating.

“We went from leading the championship with quite a bit of points to being behind by quite a bit of points. And that was a frustrating part of the season.

“So, all in all, we just need to take all the mistakes that we’ve done this year and try to improve for next year.

“I think we really did some step forwards in terms of strategy and the way we have been taking decisions recently, in the last few races.

“Unfortunately, it was a bit more difficult to show it because the pace is not as good as the beginning of the season. But I’m confident that, in terms of pace, we will manage to catch Red Bull back next year.”

Leclerc reckoned there were three key areas that Ferrari needed to focus on for next year if it is to make the progress it needs to fight for the championship. These were reliability, strategy and a better understanding of tyre management.

“It’s difficult to rank them but reliability has been a problem at one point of the season, which we paid the price for later on with penalties and other things,” he said.

“Strategy, I think we’ve done too many mistakes at one point of the season, and tyre management, we haven’t been consistent enough at our 100 percent.

“Abu Dhabi was a…