Leclerc maintained the lead at Turn 1 from pole position on the first lap.
It wasn’t long before Hamilton passed Leclerc and on lap 3 made optimal use of Mercedes’ superior speed on the straight.
The Monegasque driver finished fourth after losing Pierre Gasly at the stops and then Sebastian Vettel on the track.
Thinking about his fight with Hamilton, the Ferrari driver revealed that he was forced to cut off Turn 15 to avoid a branch on the track – Max Verstappen was forced to do the same thing as he did on the TV World feed was seen.
“Yeah, that wasn’t great,” said Leclerc. “I have no idea what that was. I saw the slippery track at Turn 15 and then I was pretty surprised by that thing there so I had to get out and then I slowed down so as not to buy time and unfortunately it started to slip away from us because we became Overtaken by Lewis and then it was a bit more difficult in the dirty air, so a bit of a shame, but that is not the reason for our P4 today anyway, we would have been overtaken a little later. “
Ferrari entered the race knowing it couldn’t compete with Mercedes and Red Bull, but Leclerc admits he was surprised by the pace of AlphaTauri and Aston Martin.
“I really enjoyed the last part, but the first part of the race wasn’t great,” added Leclerc. “It was, shall we say, as expected, it wasn’t a big disappointment, it was expected. We knew that Max, the Red Bulls and Mercedes had a little more pace than we did on the long runs, so I tried not to fight them too hard. I tried to focus on my own race.
On the subject of matching items
“But I think the two big surprises today are the two Aston Martins who flew and we have to understand because they definitely did something right today.”
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