French GP: Leclerc error leaves huge 63-point gap to Verstappen

Another race, another Ferrari implosion: Charles Leclerc inexplicably crashed out from the lead of the French Grand Prix at Circuit Paul Ricard on Sunday, handing eventual winner Max Verstappen yet another huge points boost in the battle for the title.

With 10 races to go in 2022 the reigning champ now sits 63 points clear at the top of the standings, and - if TG’s trusty calculator and its dusty book of F1 stats is to be believed - that’s a bigger points gap than has ever been recovered by an eventual F1 champion.

There are some caveats here: you get more points for a win these days (25) than you did in 2009 (10), plus a bonus point for fastest lap. So in that sense Leclerc is still less than two and a half race wins behind.

Back in 2007 for example, Kimi Raikkonen trailed Lewis Hamilton by 26 points (2.6 race wins) after seven grands prix and still turned it around in the same number of races that Leclerc has left now.

And in 1976 James Hunt was almost four race wins behind Niki Lauda with seven events remaining, the asterisks here being that a) his Austrian rival was quite badly wounded and missed two races, and b) the McLaren underdog was stripped of one win and had another reinstated, so the standings were months out of date at the time.

Anyway, the point is Leclerc already had a mountain to climb. Before the French Grand Prix it was Snowdon. Now? Mount Everest. In wellies. With a piece of cheese for an ice axe.

His crash on lap 17 is the latest in a very long line of Ferrari errors, albeit only the second that could be pinned on the driver. Other than Leclerc’s crash at Imola - which dropped him from third to sixth - the team has made mistakes on strategy that cost him victories in Silverstone and Monaco, on top of two engine failures in Spain and Baku, both while he was leading.

“I’m very disappointed,” he said afterwards. “This is not the outcome that I wanted today, as we had the pace to win. I made a mistake and paid the price for it.”

Meanwhile Max Verstappen - who sportingly asked if Leclerc was unhurt on the team radio - was equally gracious in victory: “It was really unlucky for Charles and I'm glad he's OK, it could have been a really fun race because both cars were so quick.”

You can’t help but feel like he’d enjoy a bit more of a challenge. But then he was 46 points behind after three grands prix at the start of the season, so he knows better than most how quickly things can change.

Behind him there was much else to talk about: Mercedes got its first double podium of the season (that’s four in a row for Hamilton now), Fernando Alonso scored a brilliant sixth for Alpine (having been wily enough to keep McLaren’s Lando Norris behind to “destroy” his tyres), and Carlos Sainz mounted a brilliant fightback from the back of the grid to come home fifth.

It might’ve been third, of course, however Ferrari achieved the rare operational hat-trick of gaffes with a slow pit stop leading to an unsafe release and a five-second penalty, radioing Sainz to pit mid-overtake, then calling him in again for fresh rubber too late for it to actually make a difference.

Oh dear. The team now trails Red Bull by 82 points in the constructors’ championship and - despite all their porpoising - is only 44 points ahead of Mercedes. Double oh dear.