Although he started from pole position, Charles Leclerc ultimately only finished sixth (but this was later withdrawn) at the United States Grand Prix, having been the only one in the field to complete the race by one point. -Stop pit tactic. Monaco driver still Exclusion mentioned before.
The Monegasque driver lost the lead to Lando Norris at the start, and was overtaken by Lewis Hamilton on lap six and Max Verstappen on lap eleven. He may not have had the pace to win, but his position was made more difficult by the fact that after arriving last in the pits on lap 23, he was given the hard compound tires from Ferrari, and had to complete the remainder of the race. 33 rolls on them. This was not a good option, as during the race even those who were flirting with the idea of one stop, such as Mercedes, turned to two, and Daniel Ricciardo, who was the longest persistent, abandoned this attempt eight laps before the signal.
Leclerc ended up sixth after being unable to defend against both Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez, so he didn't have to think much when Sky Sports asked him what went wrong in his race.
“It's very clear. We chose a different strategy than all the other competitors, which didn't help. That's it,” he said.
“We talk a lot about strategy. If you look at the season as a whole, you can see that we had some good races and some we didn't make the best decisions. But the biggest problem is that when you don't have the speed in the car, no matter what you decide, it's going to look “Bad. Without a doubt, today was a race in which the strategy was not correct. We have to explain why our calculations showed that the one-stop tactic would be very close to the double-stop tactic.”
Hamilton chased Verstappen by a wide margin to take the win
Leclerc raised his voice on the radio when he was faster on lap 50 and the mechanics were asked to release his teammate Carlos Sainz, who had been involved for two laps, but later explained the reason for his violent reaction.
“At first I did not understand because I did not know that Perez was under pressure. As soon as I saw that, I understood the situation. I had no problem with it, I was just waiting for an explanation,” he explained what happened.
At the end of the Austin race, Leclerc had a very uninteresting results streak, unable to convert his last top 10 into a victory.
