After apparently delaying Carlos Sainz a few seconds, Ferrari's Charles Leclerc reveals that he had no issues on the position swap at the F1 Mexican Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc started the race P8—further up the F1 grid from where he would've liked. However, after a massive mixup at turn 1 involving Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas and McLaren's Daniel Ricciardo, Leclerc managed to squiggle his way through the traffic and slotted his Ferrari in 5th behind Pierre Gasly's AlphaTauri.

Later on in the race, Ferrari made a change in race strategy that gave teammate Carlos Sainz a great burst of pace—enough to challenge Gasly. Ferrari ordered Leclerc to let Sainz through to challenge Gasly—but with Leclerc holding up the line and delaying the position swap, the challenge became unsuccessful. Leclerc explains post-race the situation at hand.

Via Motorsport:

“I was okay with it,” explained Leclerc about the team orders call. “Basically, I had a very tough time with the hard tyres in the first laps with the things I was complaining on the radio.”

Leclerc recalls struggling with the lapped cars, “As soon as I was asked to let him by, I had the blue flag so I had to go through [George] Russell and [Lance] Stroll, so the two cars that had blue flags in front of me.”

Sainz understands the difficulty and challenge of performing a position swap in F1, but he reiterated that the delay in swapping cost him 2 to 3 seconds in race time. Later on, Sainz gave back the position to Leclerc—honoring the agreement between the team and the drivers.