Charles Leclerc admitted it was “very difficult” to adapt to working with a new race engineer at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
Before the weekend, Ferrari announced an organizational restructuring with Brian Pozzi replacing Xavi Marcos as Leclerc's race engineer.
The role of the race engineer involves constant communication with the driver while on track, acting as a liaison between the team and the driver.
Leclerc has worked with Marcus since joining Ferrari in 2019 and admitted the swap ahead of Imola was difficult to adapt to on the opening stage of the weekend.
“He did a very good job,” Leclerc said of Bossi, speaking to the media including: Racing News 365. “It's always very difficult when you make a change, especially in the middle of the season, as was the case here.
“So there were a lot of new things that he had to quickly keep up with. I also had Johannes [Hatz]who was my performance engineer, who was new to the track.
“So I had a couple of people on my team who were new to their role and it was quite difficult at first, but they actually did a great job and it went really well.
“Now we'll work on it and try to get better, but it's a really good start.”
Leclerc appeared to be aiming for second place at Imola before a mistake at Turn 14 led to his lead being reversed.
However, the driver from Monaco confirmed that Lando Norris' increased pace at the front, rather than a decline in his speed, was the reason behind the end of the attack.
“To be honest, my speed was pretty similar the whole time,” he said. “Lando had gained so much speed, it was not possible for me to return to DRS.
“Then I was in a very critical gap with Lando where you don't get the benefits of DRS, but you only lose in the corners, which at the start of the mission with Hard, with our speed advantage, I could have gotten inside DRS.
“But once I lost that, Lando at the same time started to push a little bit more. And the two combined made me go back a little bit. But I also had to try something a little different.”
“I knew that by controlling the tires and attacking Lando at the end it wasn't right because the speed advantage wasn't enough. So at first I tried to put him under a little more pressure.
