If the championship started with Max Verstappen as the favorite and having to deal with Red Bull's unreliability to survive, now the ordeal is Charles Leclerc's, who seeks to overcome Ferrari itself. The Italian team, now unaccustomed to great contests, seems unable to find a middle ground between inertia and excess. And it is also starting to break down
Charles Leclerc has had an unremarkable season with Ferrari, and yet he is no longer the leader of the Drivers' World Championship. The Monegasque, who had a 34-point lead over the rest of the grid - 46 for Max Verstappen, always seen as his main rival - has melted in the last four races. But his share of the blame is minimal. The truth is that the Italian team has lost its hand.
And to see this at this point in the championship is almost desperate. It is one thing for Ferrari to feel the pressure in the famous 'time of the jaguar to drink water', in the final third of the year, something like that. It is quite another to compromise the chances of its main driver with the season still so early. Monaco has not even started properly and Charles is already behind Verstappen.
The picture at the moment is quite worrying for Leclerc's and Ferrari's F1 2022 pretensions. If the year had started with Verstappen fighting against Red Bull's complicated reliability, now it is Charles who has his own team almost as his first enemy: reliability has opened its spout, tactics are terrible.
It is very true that Leclerc's bad moment in the championship started with a rare mistake of the driver in 2022, when he kissed the wall in Emilia-Romagna, but since then there were three races and three Ferrari interferences in the results, in different ways: inertia in Miami, breakage in Spain, excess in Monaco.
Going back to the beginning of the season, F1 2022 starts with two triumphs by Leclerc in the first three races: Bahrain and Australia. In Saudi Arabia, he could even have won, but lost the direct duel on track to Verstappen. It was in that sequence, after the race in Melbourne, that Charles went to 71 points against Max's 25.
Then the game started to change from Imola on. Looking for a recovery, in the hunt for Sergio Pérez, the Monegasque threw away his podium when he lost the car and hit the wall. He was very fortunate not to have had to abandon his car, and ended up sixth. Only Verstappen won and set the fastest lap. The gap was already cut to 27 points.
In Miami, even with Ferrari dominating the front row, Leclerc didn't make it again. On the track, he was run over by Verstappen in the opening laps, but he could still have a chance. The fact is that a safety-car appeared on the final straight of the race and the team could very well have stopped one more time and tried to jump the cat. They didn't. Simply because they had no tires other than the hard ones for that moment. A basic mistake, let's face it, even more so in a street track and a rookie, with so much potential for a safety car and even a red flag.
While all this was going on, it must also be said: Red Bull started to update its car and already came up with a frightening straight-line speed. In Miami, it was already possible to say that the Taurus had the best car. Not the most reliable, of course, but the fastest. This is how F1 left for Spain, where nine of the ten teams had considerable innovations in their cars. And Ferrari was among them.
The package worked on Saturday, Charles took pole again after leading all free practice, but then things turned sour: race breakdown, engine. Breakdown at Guanyu Zhou, from Alfa Romeo, Ferrari's client: lack of power. And this was repeated in Monaco, by the way, with Valtteri Bottas and the two Haas drivers. Even reliability started to wobble.
But let's get back to the Spanish GP, which simply generated the turning point in the championship. Without Leclerc, who was coming to win until he broke down, Verstappen triumphed again and moved ahead in the points table. In other words, if before Charles could take it easy because he had the advantage, he now became the hunter. And he was already far from his honeymoon with the team.
But it was in Monaco that the bombshell exploded, and Leclerc's patience with Ferrari ran out. Not for nothing. With a history of 100% failures in his home race, Charles carried with him one of those classic curses of someone who cannot shine in front of his compatriots. On Saturday, dominant pole again. On Sunday, leadership even on a wet track. It seemed that the stars were aligning, finally.
That was when Ferrari decided to leave inertia aside just when they didn't need to. And ended with the Monegasque's dream. While Carlos Sainz refused to go to the pits and change his rain tires for intermediate ones, Leclerc trusted the team. Poor guy. With the stop made late, he came back behind Perez and definitely did not have to go to the pits. There was simply no one passing anyone, there was no sense in fearing the attacks of the Red Bull duo with the intermediates. It was just a matter of waiting for the track to dry out and everyone would put on dry track tires. Sainz warned, after all.
Charles' chances were over, there is no question about it. But the young driver kept his frustration to himself and unleashed everything at once in the second pit stop. It was at the time of the double pit-stop, in a confusion on the team's own radio, not knowing whether he should stop or not. Leclerc cussed a lot on the radio, lost the podium to Verstappen and left the track finished.
The fury on the radio, the angry interview, all this was part of a new version of the driver for many people. But totally understandable. The scene now is one of someone who knows he can be champion and, specifically last weekend, who had an unprecedented home win in his hands. Nobody is ironclad.
"Disappointment is not the word. Mistakes happen, but today there were too many mistakes. In these conditions you rely on what the team says, because you can't see anything but what the others are doing with the intermediate tires. I was asked if I wanted to go from extreme rain tires to slicks and I said yes, but not at that moment. It would be later in the race, so I don't understand what made us change our mind and go to intermediate. We suffered the undercut," he pointed out.
"Then I stopped behind Carlos. A lot of mistakes, we can't afford that. It's difficult, as it has been other times in years past, so I'm used to going home disappointed, but we can't do that, especially at this moment. We are fast, our pace is strong, and we have to take advantage of these opportunities. You can't afford to lose that many points. It's not falling from first to second: it's first to fourth. After the first mistake, we made another one. But I love my team and I know that we will come back faster," he continued.
The big problem there is that we cannot know if the honeymoon of Leclerc and Ferrari will be resumed. As much as the car has gotten faster, Monaco is a very specific track, Red Bull is more reliable, and, of course, Verstappen appears at the top. What will happen if Ferrari breaks down again?
If Charles once appeared even as a favorite for the title, today he is clearly a sniper. The ball of the moment is with Red Bull and Verstappen, it remains to be seen what Leclerc and Ferrari have up their sleeves. For now, the sampling has not been the best. And much to the fault of the Italians.