Leclerc maintained the lead into Turn 1 from pole posit🌼ion on the opening 🤡lap.

It didn’t take long for Hamilton to get past Leclerc, making the most of Mercedes’ su🐟perior straight-line speed on Lap 3.

The Monegasque driver went on to finish fourth, having lo♏st out to Pierr🐻e Gasly through the stops and then Sebastian Vettel on track.

Reflecting on his 🥃fight with Hamilton, the Ferrari driver revealed he was forced to cut Turn 15 to avoid a tree branch on track - Max Verstappen was forced to do the same as seen on the TV world feed.

“Yeah, that wasn’t great,” Leclerc said. “I have no idea what that was. I saw the slippery track in Turn 15 and then I got quite surprised with this thing there, so I had to go out, and then I slowed down to not gain time, and unfortunately, that’s where it started to slip away from us, because we got overtaken by Lewis and then it was a bit more difficult in dirty air so a bit of a shame, but this is not the cause of our P4 anyway today, we wou💙ld have got overtaken a bit later.”

Ferrari went into the race knowing it couldn’t compete wi🔜th Mercedes and Red Bull, but Leclerc admits he was surprised by the pace of Alpha💟Tauri and Aston Martin.

“I really enjoyed the last part but the first part of the race wasn’t great,” Leclerc added. “It was, let’s💙 say, as expected, it wasn’t a huge disappointment, it was expected. We knew that Max, the Red Bulls and Mercedes had quite a bit ꦆmore pace than us on the long runs, so I tried to not fight them too much., tried to focus on my own race.

“But I think the tw▨o big surprises of today are the two Aston Martins that were flying, and we need to understand it because they definitely did som🎀ething right today.”