Leclerc: Ferrari still seeking ‘complete answer’ for F1 tyre woes despite P2

The Monegasque led almost all of the Silverstone race following a first-lap collision between title rivals Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen until he was passed by a recovering Hamilton three laps from the end.

Leclerc demonstrated competitive pace in the first stint and was able to keep Hamilton at bay, but after switching onto the hard compound, Mercedes held the advantage as Hamilton charged to a fightback victory.

“On the hard, it’s not like something felt especially weak,” Leclerc explained. “It felt quite good but whenever I started to hit the traffic, I could feel we were on a bit more fragile tyre and we seemed to suffer a bit more.

“By being [close to] those guys, even though it was so quite far, I could feel the rear of the car was not as stable as I wanted it to be. This made us lose a little bit the pace that we had before.

“But overall, even when everything felt good, Lewis was just much quicker than us on those hard tyres.”

Ferrari has been investigating its tyre degradation issues ever since suffering its worst performance of the season at the French Grand Prix, where Carlos Sainz and Leclerc finished a dismal 11th and 16th.

“There’s been a big investigation after France to try to understand exactly why we were struggling that much with those front tyres - I don’t think we get that answer yet,” Leclerc added.

"So yes, we are much better here but I don’t think it is because we found the complete answer of what happened in France. So, the investigation is still going on and we are still working hard on it.

“And even though we’ve had a good day today we don’t forget about the bad day in France and once we understand the full extent of why we were slow in France then I’m pretty sure we will do a big step as a team and it will help us to reproduce this type of performance as we did today.”

Asked what Ferrari had done to address the tyre issue, team principal Mattia Binotto replied: “I won’t go into the details, but we certainly worked a lot in the simulator with simulations, with the drivers with the team, trying to get a better understanding of what’s wrong, how to address it.

“And I think this is what I’m happy and pleased with, to see the progress.”