Ferrari still licking their wounds after Monaco fiasco: 'We left with a bittersweet taste'

Ferrari's head of race strategy said they had identified the two errors they made that cost Charles Leclerc victory in his home Monaco Grand Prix. Leclerc had qualified on pole, but could not even finish on the podium and had to settle for fourth place.

Ferrari's head of race strategy Inaki Rueda said the two mistakes were made because Sergio Perez lapped quicker than expected.

"With Charles, we made two mistakes. The first one was to cover Perez," Rueda said, as reported by racer.com. "While with Carlos [Sainz], we realised very late in his lap that we could not cover Perez, with Charles we had a big gap, and we thought we could cover Perez.

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"At the start of his in-lap, Charles had over 10 seconds advantage on Perez, and we thought this advantage would shrink because Perez on the intermediate tyres was lapping much faster than Charles on the extreme (wet). We had looked at other people, we had the live data from the cars, and we thought that this gap would shrink from around 10 seconds to maybe five, four, three seconds at worst.

"As we were coming in, we saw the 10 seconds gap shrinking: seven, six, five, four, as Charles was coming through the Swimming Pool. The last timing reference we had indicated that he would come out one second ahead of Perez. What we did not expect was Perez to go nine seconds faster overall on that lap. Because of this, we lost the race with Charles."

Then, due to a Ferrari team decision, Leclerc would drop out of the podium places altogether.

Both cars on the podium, maybe?

"The second mistake we made with Charles was a gap mistake again," Rueda said. "We wanted to pit both cars onto dry tyres. On Lap 21, we