Charles Leclerc confessed it was “quite difficult” to get used to working with a new race engineer for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Prior to the weekend, Ferrari announced an organisational overhaul, with Bryan Bozzi replacing Xavi Marcos as Leclerc’s race engineer. A race engineer’s responsibilities include maintaining continual communication with a driver while on track, serving as a liaison between the team and the driver.
Leclerc had worked with Marcos since joining Ferrari in 2019, and he conceded that the change ahead of Imola was difficult to adjust to in the early stages of the weekend. “He has done very well,” Leclerc remarked of Bozzi, speaking with RacingNews365. “It’s always difficult to change, especially in the middle of a season, as was the case here. “There were many new things for him to learn. I also had Johannes [Hatz], my performance engineer, who was fresh to the track. “So I had two people in my team who were new in their roles, and it was fairly difficult at first, but they’ve done an outstanding job.
Now we’ll work on that and try to get better, but it’s a really good start.”
Leclerc looked to be in the hunt for a second-place result at Imola before a mistake at Turn 14 dented his surge.
However, the Monegasque driver asserted that an increase in pace from Lando Norris ahead, rather than a drop off in his own pace, was to blame for the end of the attack.
“To be honest my pace was quite similar for the whole stint,” he said. “It’s more Lando that then gained quite a bit of pace, and it was not possible for me to come back within DRS.
“Then I was in a very awkward gap to Lando where you don’t get the benefits of the DRS, but you are just losing in corners, which at the beginning of the stint with the Hard, with our pace advantage, I could get within DRS.
“But then as soon as I lost it, it was also at the same time Lando started to push a bit more. And the two things put together made me go back a little bit. But I also had to try something a little bit different.
“I knew that by managing the tyres and attacking Lando at the end it was not the right thing because the pace advantage was not enough. So I just tried at the beginning to put him under a bit more pressure.”