Charles Leclerc warns Ferrari start advantage won’t last as Mercedes adapts

Charles Leclerc believes Ferrari’s blistering launch advantage won’t last long, predicting Mercedes will soon unlock the secret to perfect starts.

Last time out in Melbourne, Formula 1 had its first glimpse of the new technical regulations with George Russell converting pole position into a grand prix victory.

Charles Leclerc predicts Mercedes will soon match Ferrari’s strong Formula 1 starts

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However, he didn’t have it all his own way.

Russell powered his way to pole position in his Mercedes W17 and crossed the line eight-tenths ahead of the nearest non-Mercedes driver.

He lined up on pole ahead of Kimi Antonelli, Isack Hadjar and Charles Leclerc while Lewis Hamilton was seventh. But as the drivers exited Turn 1, it was Leclerc, Russell and Hamilton who were the leading trio.

Leclerc muscled his way through the middle of the pack as he split the Mercedes drivers to pass Russell down the inside into Turn 1. Hamilton took a different route, going around the outside.

It was an impressive start from Ferrari, but not unexpected, as reports claim the team is running a smaller turbo than its rivals, which allows Ferrari to find the ideal revs for the start configuration more easily.

Leclerc, though, believes it is only a matter of time before rivals, especially Mercedes, work out what they need to do to make a perfect launch.

“I unfortunately don’t think we’re going to keep that advantage,” admitted Leclerc in the build-up to the Chinese Grand Prix Sprint weekend. “I think whenever the engines are all run in the optimal window, I don’t think there’s going to be that much difference between cars at the start.

“We have an advantage in terms of robustness of our system, where we seem to get into the optimal window a little bit easier compared to others, and especially Mercedes.

“But once Mercedes will know how to put themselves in the optimal window, I don’t think there will be that much difference between the cars and I don’t expect them to take long before knowing how to put themselves in the optimal window.

“So, yeah, I don’t think that this will be an advantage that lasts the season.”

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But while Leclerc and Hamilton stormed off the line, others weren’t as quick – or even moving at all.

Liam Lawson, who lined up P8, was “sitting there” as he “lost all power”, which led to a scary moment with Franco Colapinto as the fast-approaching Alpine driver had to make a last-second dive around the outside of Lawson’s Racing Bulls car.

Leclerc reckons the decision to turn the lights off the second the five red lights were shown added to the problems that several drivers faced.

“As expected, I think this first race of the season was very eventful,” he said. “I mean, there was many, many things happening. We kind of expected it.

“It’s also true that we are starting on probably one of the worst track of the season for energy management, and Australia is a very tough one for that.

“If you add to the start that, I think the lights went off the quickest that I’ve been seeing some in Formula One as well, that made everything a lot trickier than it already is.

“This is the second race weekend. We already have a Sprint weekend, so it’s not the easiest and smoothest start of the season there is.

“I think, before taking a big decision, we need to wait maybe for races where it’s a little bit more in the norm for the rest of the season, and to then judge. I think already this weekend should be in a much healthier place for everybody.”

Charles Leclerc refutes ‘artificial overtaking’ concerns

Although Leclerc led into Turn 1, the Monegasque driver struggled to hold onto the position as he and Russell traded blows throughout the opening 12 laps.

The two swapped the lead eight times in a battle that was largely battery-led, depending on where they were in the harvesting and deployment cycle.

While it made for exciting racing, it has been called out as artificial with Helmut Marko saying it wasn’t overtaking, it was “passing”.

For Leclerc, it’s not much different to yesteryear’s DRS passes with the Ferrari driver recalling his 2022 back-and-forth game of cat-and-mouse with Max Verstappen at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

“No, there’s just an additional way of getting past each other,” he explained.

“And honestly, in the past, I think we were doing that in more specific scenarios. I remember the battle with Max in 2022 in Jeddah, where we were both doing strange things on braking to be behind at the DRS detection, etc. So these were the kind of games that you were also playing in the past for different reasons.

“Now, obviously it’s for a completely different topic, and something you do much more regularly. But yeah, it’s how to optimise an overtake.

“And it’s not only about the overtake anymore. The overtake is not enough.

“You need to think about how you can get past a car with using the least energy possible. And so this is a bit of an added complexity.

“I don’t think it’s as we’ve seen in the first few laps, at least for me, I didn’t think that there was any artificial overtaking there, apart from maybe George in Turn Three, at one point where he really deployed a lot more. But then all the rest was actually quite fun racing.

“I’ve seen also that in the back it was not always fun racing, sometimes it was a bit artificial. So we might have more artificial overtakes, but I think all in all, we will still see the same amount of good overtakes that we used to see before.

“There will just be a bit more overtakes as a whole, because there will be more done by energy.”

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