Ferrari pick up the pace too late to stop Red Bull running away again · RaceFans

Red Bull romped to another one-two in Jeddah as Charles Leclerc didn’t have the pace to keep up with them.

But the Ferrari driver took some encouragement from the pace of his car towards the end of his stints. Leclerc found it difficult to get his tyres working to begin with, but his pace improved once they came up to temperature.

But the crucial question remains how far the Red Bull drivers were pushing by that stage in the race.

Leclerc had to fight a rear-guard action to prevent Sergio Perez nabbing second place off him on the first lap. Even then he was only able to contain the second Red Bull for three laps, until Perez flipped open his DRS and breezed by into second place.

The Ferrari driver was still losing up to half a second to the leading RB20s on his original set of medium tyres when the Safety Car appeared on lap seven and the trio pitted together. From there they ran on hard tyres until the end.

Leclerc dropped back significantly from Verstappen at this time, and took many more laps to pass Lando Norris in the McLaren. But by the end of the race he was lapping quicker than both Red Bulls.

“We were struggling all the time at the beginning of the stints, whether it was at the beginning of the medium or beginning on the hards, we struggled to switch the tyres on,” he explained. “Then towards the end of the stint we were pretty good.

“With the medium, we didn’t really see that. With the hard, we saw that towards the end, but it was too late to actually recover what we had lost at the beginning with the battles we had.”

Leclerc’s pace was strong enough that he was able to beat Verstappen to the fastest lap of the race. They both set their quickest times on the final lap of the race, but only Leclerc beat the time Lewis Hamilton set on a set of soft tyres a dozen laps earlier.

“All in all, it’s been a positive race,” Leclerc summarised. “I think we are doing small steps in the right direction.

“If I look back the last six, seven months, we are the team that have improved the most and we are slowly closing the gap. So the gap is still quite big. But if we keep working like that, I’m sure it’s a matter of time before we put the Red Bull under a bit more pressure.”

However Verstappen’s performance in the final laps was compromised by traffic – he had to lap the cluster of cars which Kevin Magnussen purposefully held up earlier in the race. This made it harder to keep…