Ferrari explains what the message 'box to overtake' meant for Leclerc

Max Verstappen won the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix, but the victory seemed in the hands of Charles Leclerc for a long time. Ferrari took full advantage of the safety car after Sergio Perez's pit stop, which the team enforced with a somewhat cryptic radio message addressed to the Monegasque.

In a debriefing video on LinkedIn Iñaki Rueda, sports and strategy director at Ferrari, told how the team put the ball in Red Bull Racing's court. "Towards the end of the first stint, we noticed that we could close the gap to Perez. With that, we tried to put Red Bull in a difficult position," he begins his explanation.

Box to overtake

What followed was a somewhat cryptic message to Leclerc: "Box to overtake," it sounded on the on-board radio. "By this we meant that he should come in if Perez stayed out and try an undercut, and that he should stay out if Perez came in. That's how we put the ball in Red Bull's court," Rueda concludes.

He acknowledges that Ferrari was lucky that Perez's pit stop was followed almost immediately by a safety car. This allowed the team to immediately call both drivers in and allowed both Leclerc and Carlos Sainz to come back onto the track ahead of Perez.