Charles Leclerc admits that the early tyre graining he suffered in the Las Vegas GP was “my bad” after he pushed too hard while fighting George Russell.
From fourth on the grid Leclerc jumped past Pierre Gasly and his Ferrari team mate Carlos Sainz to claim second place.
He then pushed leader Russell hard in the early laps, just failing to go around the outside of the Mercedes driver at Turn 1 on the fourth lap.
However soon afterwards front graining became so severe that he let Sainz past, before also losing a place to Max Verstappen.
Leclerc eventually finished fourth after what was a difficult race for Ferrari to manage, and which saw him swearing on team radio after the flag.
“I felt like I had everything under control,” said Leclerc of the early laps. “But then from one corner to the other, I lost three seconds per lap, which was absolutely crazy. So yeah, that took me by surprise, and we lost quite a lot there.”
“But then on the hard we were strong. But obviously it wasn’t enough to do anything better than third and fourth.”
Leclerc admitted that the graining in the opening stint was made worse by his battle with Russell.
“I think so,” he said. “It didn’t affect him too much. It did affect me, though. Being in dirty air, you pay a lot the price of this.”
“So that was difficult to manage for me, but I just went a bit too much, I just put too much stress on the tyres in the first stint. So it’s my bad.”
He added: “When I started to feel the medium going at lap 6, I was like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look great for the rest of the race’.”
“But then with the hard everything felt a little bit more in line with what I expected, and then we were in a good place. I think if you had told me that we’ll finish fourth after the first stint, I probably would have taken it.”
Leclerc expects McLaren to have the upper hand in the title battle at the next race.
“It’s going to be until the very end,” he said. “I think they are going to be very strong in Qatar.”
“So we’ve got to have a good weekend, and I will be very surprised if we recover points from them, but we’ve got to. So we’ll do our best, but I expect it to be tricky.”
