Leclerc's plight has the echoes of a former F1 champion

F1

Charles Leclerc is watching this year's F1 title slip away – back in 1999, a similar story almost unravelled

Mika Hakkinen sits in his McLaren F1 car in 1999

Like Leclerc, Häkkinen saw golden chances slip away

DPPI

Author

Damien Smith

The roar of pure anguish and the haunted look in his eyes said it all. Charles Leclerc doesn’t need anyone to lecture him on what he threw away by spinning out of the lead of the French Grand Prix on Sunday. Ferrari technical failures and strategy misfires are hard enough to swallow, and he’s had plenty of those to chew on this season. But when you have no one to blame but yourself… That’s what hurts the most.

Leclerc has rightly won praise for the raw honesty he has shown in the past couple of days. How he takes responsibility for his own actions and is, if anything, overly hard on himself in the public eye, is one of his most endearing character traits. But it’s now when he can show why he’s a true top-liner, by parking the pain of Paul Ricard somewhere deep inside to go out and win the Hungarian Grand Prix. It’s a blessing he dropped the clanger in France because he has so little time to stew. Just don’t do it again this weekend in Budapest, Charles – that would really put the final nail in your summer holiday.

Mistakes happen. He’s human. But it’s rare for top drivers to throw away leads as Leclerc did. The moment carried echoes of a similarly painful drop, but from a man who already had a world title under his belt – and was under much less pressure. At least at first glance.

McLaren F1 driver Mika Hakkinen crashes at the 1999 Italian GP

Häkkinen crashed at both Imola and Monza

DPPI

Remember Mika Häkkinen at Monza in 1999? The Finn and reigning world champion didn’t even have his nemesis breathing down his neck. Michael Schumacher was in the final stages of recovery from the broken leg incurred a couple of months earlier at the British GP, an accident that spoilt for the third consecutive season his increasingly desperate bid to end Ferrari’s 20-year world title drought. He wasn’t even in the Italian GP.

Fast-forward to Leclerc at Paul Ricard on Sunday. He’d led from pole position and fended off early attentions from Verstappen, but the French GP was still well and truly in the balance as he headed to the Beausset long right-hander on lap 18. Leclerc’s nemesis, Max Verstappen, had stopped two laps earlier for what was planned as his only pit visit and a set of hard-compound Pirellis. The question now for Ferrari’s ace was how long he could eke out his worn mediums to create a positive tyre strategy offset that would give him an advantage later in the race. He’d sure need it if he was to lose the lead to the Red Bull at his own stop and was then forced into an on-track pass of the hard-headed world champion.

So this was real pressure. Yes, Charles shouldn’t have spun, and yes, it was a terrible mistake. But at least there was context. Häkkinen’s error was harder to forgive.

From the archive

Having said that, Mika was rattled back in September 1999. Sure, Schumacher was out of the picture (for now), but Häkkinen and McLaren-Mercedes had made heavy weather when they should have been making hay that summer. Ferrari number two Eddie Irvine had dug deep, aided most notably at Hockenheim by super-sub Mika Salo, to push himself into contention. Meanwhile, a combination of unreliability from McLaren, a few questionable strategy calls and alarming driver errors undermined Häkkinen’s season. Sounds familiar.

There’s some irony that back then Ferrari was cast in the Red Bull role. Sure, it hadn’t yet got on the winning streak that would carry Schumacher to five consecutive titles from the turn of the millennium, but the Todt-Brawn-Byrne-Schumacher super-team was almost fully matured and properly sharp. The red cars were close to bullet-proof. If only Mattia Binotto’s Ferrari of today could bottle some of that potent brew for the months to come.

Häkkinen’s fragility hadn’t been helped by team-mate David Coulthard enjoying one of his all too rare platinum-grade days at the previous race at Spa, having gone wheel to wheel through La Source and beaten Mika in a straight fight. Where were the team orders, Häkkinen asked, with some legitimacy? Ron Dennis just rubbed in some salt by placing the blame on Mika for the DC wheel-rub.

Ferrari F1 driver Eddie Irvine at a press conference in 1999

Irvine emerged as unlikely contender to Häkkinen’s crown

DPPI

But here in Italy, the Finn finally looked set to banish his vulnerabilities once and for all. Having completed 30 laps of 53, he held a comfortable seven-second lead over the in-form Jordan of Heinz-Harald Frentzen and all looked serene – until he paddle-shifted down one click too many, hooking first gear instead of second at Monza’s old left-right first-corner chicane. The MP4/14’s rear wheels locked, around it swung, Häkkinen lost his engine and the car slid to a halt on the scrubby exit. As the tifosi roared in delight and an astonished Frentzen took the lead, Mika threw his steering wheel from the cockpit, chucked his gloves to the ground in a fury and sought the sanctuary of Monza’s greenery to crouch in sorrow. But even 23 years, ago there was nowhere to hide from the cameras as a lens pointing from a merciless helicopter invaded his moment of grief. Horrible. And it wasn’t even the first time that season he’d committed such a sin, having crashed out of the lead at Imola too.

“In 1999 the regulations changed a bit,” Häkkinen told Motor Sport’s Simon Taylor in 2010, referring to the fourth groove that had been added to the dreaded front tyres of that era. “Adrian [Newey] built a car that was more on the limit, we had a few technical problems. Then Michael had his crash at Silverstone and missed six races. I like to believe that if Michael had been there I’d still have won the title, but the satisfaction wasn’t the same.

Mika Hakkinen crying after crashing out of 1999 italian GP

Tears flow after Monza error

Andreas Rentz/Bongarts/Getty Images

“At Imola our strategy was two stops. Every lap had to be a qualifying lap. I was pulling out the advantage I needed, got on the kerb too much, lost the back end, hit the wall. The only person I can blame is myself. At Monza, same thing, I am leading, I crash. That time there were other factors: I selected the wrong gear, my mistake, but the transmission locked up, which it shouldn’t have done.”

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As Frentzen scored the second win of his season (and the third and final victory of his career), team boss Eddie Jordan had extra reason to cheer. He’d placed a £2000 each-way bet on H-HF delivering at Monza… Back in sixth, Irvine scrabbled a point to draw level with Häkkinen at the top of the standings – and we started to wonder, was this really going to happen? Surely Mika wouldn’t give this title away, to a driver who was never on his level.

He didn’t, of course. But only after a McLaren tyre strategy botch at a wet Nürburgring, Schumacher returning (without much enthusiasm) to help Irvine’s title cause at the first Malaysian GP, where the bargeboard controversy blew up – only for the FIA to then over-rule its own stewards to set up a title showdown at Suzuka. Outrageous times. In Japan, Häkkinen scored his fifth win of the year, and convincingly so, to become champion for a second time. But he’d started from pole on 11 occasions that season and had shipped so many points… again, a familiar ring to Leclerc today.

The 63-point chasm that’s opened up to Verstappen will likely thwart the Häkkinen parallel ending in the same conclusion – whatever Binotto might say (but surely not actually believe) about Ferrari winning all of the final 10 races. But Leclerc should at least be offered a small morsel of comfort – which he surely won’t accept – that even the proven F1 greats can drop a whopper every now and then. They just don’t make a habit out of it.

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