Leclerc's Dutch GP thwarted by early floor damage

From the frying pan on Saturday, Charles Leclerc jumped into the fire on Sunday at Zandvoort as the Monegasque's Dutch Grand Prix weekend went from bad to worse.

After battling handling issues in qualifying, Leclerc set his sights on at least improving on his P9 starting position.

But that plan was undermined from the outset following an opening lap contact with McLaren's Oscar Piastri that damaged the Ferrari's front wing which later led to an off-track excursion and floor damage.

Oddly, the Scuderia opted not to change the element when Leclerc pitted for intermediates after a single lap when the rain set.

• Read also: Leclerc is lost – has 'zero idea' how Ferrari car will react

The early stop carried him up into the top-six but a switch back to the softs on lap 11 – when the team also replaced the SF-23's front wing – pushed Leclerc out of the top-ten from where he was unable to make any progress due to his car's damaged floor.

He nevertheless stayed out with the hope that more rain would shake up the running order.

But when that failed to materialise, Ferrari put its driver out of its misery as the SF-23's handling was only getting worse, which left Leclerc with his third DNF of the 2023 season.

"On the first lap when we had the damage, I could feel much more than the guys were telling me on the radio," Leclerc recounted after his retirement.

"I think initially it was five to 10 points [of downforce we were missing] but then we realised that it was more than 60.

"That is a different category, so after that first lap, it was all uphill.

"We were just waiting for some rain, you can do something different than the other and maybe get one or two points, every point counts so we didn't want to give up too early.

"It was such a slight touch, but for some reason, it had huge consequences for my car," said Leclerc regarding his early clash with Piastri.

When Leclerc made his first pitstop, Ferrari crews were seen scrambling for the inters. The Monegasque said that he had made the late call to pit, which caught his team off-guard.

"I did call for it, in the last corner, so very late," he said. "But obviously looking at the [weather] situation in the last corner I was very sure that even if we had lost five or six seconds at the pitstop, we would recover them during one lap easily.

"I expected to lose some time, we could have optimised it as a team just for the guys to be ready a little bit earlier in those types of situations, but apart from that I think it was the right choice."

Overall however, it was clearly an unsatisfactory end to and unsatisfactory weekend for Leclerc, just one week before the House of Maranello's home race at Monza.

Ferrari will have at least taken some consolation from Carlos Sainz's fifth-place finish in the Netherlands.

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