Charles Leclerc says he’s encountered radio problems for the last ‘three or four races’ amid another tough outing for Ferrari at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Ferrari’s slump continued at the Hungaroring with Leclerc and Carlos Sainz trailing home seventh and eighth respectively, over a minute behind race winner Max Verstappen.
Having qualified sixth, Leclerc had been running a promising fifth when a 9s pit stop dropped him behind Sainz and denied him the opportunity to overcut Lewis Hamilton.
Although he would get back past his Ferrari partner at the second round of stops, a five-second time penalty for speeding in the pit lane demoted him behind George Russell.
“The pit stop was quite slow, we had a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane,” he said. “So again, that is difficult.
“Honestly, it’s frustrating overall because I felt that, the pace we had today, even as a driver when you are feeling like you are doing a good job with the car you have, nobody really notices it. When you are doing a bad job, everybody notices it.
“It’s difficult but in the end, it’s part of the game and it’s just up to us now to do a step forward as McLaren did.
“Now we are on the back foot, it’s been confirmed through the last three weekends. There is a lot of work to do.”
Leclerc believes the various mishaps that hampered his advances meant the end result appeared worse than Ferrari’s underlying competitiveness on Sunday.
However, he acknowledges that the Italian outfit is still lagging behind its immediate rivals, with McLaren’s resurgence continuing as Lando Norris secured a second consecutive podium finish.
“Honestly, today I feel like the result is much worse than what it felt like,” he argued.
“The first stint felt pretty good, then with the slow stop it really put us on the back foot behind Lance. I had to push a lot, then we were with Carlos and we lost a bit of time there. Then in the third stint, I pushed again and there again, the car felt quite OK.
“I feel like the result looks a lot worse than what it actually is. But it’s clear that compared to Lando especially, we are still behind.”
The Monegasque driver has also revealed that radio problems have stopped him from communicating clearly with his team at the past three or four race weekends.
“The problem is that we have also a lot of problems with the radio,” he disclosed. “One out of four words is not understood by my engineer because there is problems with our radio for three or four races.
“We need to fix that, and obviously, my tone of voice is quite high because I need to make myself heard. But I just wanted to make sure that they didn’t understand me wrong and that I wanted to go aggressive early and not aggressive late. It was just about clarifying because of our radio issues.”
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