After Saturday’s terrible qualifying, Charles Leclerc and Ferrari were called to try and salvage their Canadian GP weekend. Unfortunately, Sunday was even worse for the Scuderia. The team leaves the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve with zero points. For the Monegasque, Montreal was a disaster. An engine problem complicated his race from the beginning before a strategy gamble killed off any chances of points.
LECLERC: “WE WERE MISSING 20-25 KM/H ON THE STRAIGHT”
What emerged today was yet another problem with the Ferrari power unit. This is not a good sign, as Leclerc himself admitted:
“The fact that we change engines often is not a very good sign. Having said that, we have to analyze what the problem was today, I don’t know what it was honestly.
“I was going a second, a second and a half slower on the straights. It was a difficult race to manage because, in addition to losing that time on the straights, I had a thousand things to do on the wheel .”
These comments from the Monegasque reinforce suggestions of a problem with the electronic control unit of the engine.
Despite this problem, Leclerc fought for points in the early stages. However, his issue became more costly when the track started to dry:
“It was going well until the conditions were difficult. In the end, we were on the same pace as those around me, and that gives you a bit of confidence.
“Then, with the dry track, you can take fewer risks than when it is wet, and this tends to level everything out. By losing a second and a half, I let everyone pass me, and then I knew the race was over. We were missing something like 20-25 km/h on the straight .”
During the tyre change, Ferrari managed to intervene in Leclerc’s car to solve the problem. For a few laps, the Monegasque managed to maintain a reasonable pace – but the decision was soon taken to retire:
“We reset the car during the pit stop, and magically, it was better, but we don’t know why the torque coming out of corners was inconsistent, so it was impossible to drive .”
BETTER PERFORMANCE THAN QUALIFICATION
Leclerc, who slips to 56 points behind Max Verstappen, believes today was not indicative of the SF-24’s race pace.
“Today, the problem was the engine, and that’s it. If we take away the second and a half tied to At the start of the race we weren’t in too bad a shape .”
Ahead of the Spanish GP scheduled in two weeks, Ferrari must understand what happened on Saturday:
“Today was mainly that, yesterday was something else that we need to analyse, and that’s where we lost the race with what happened. We shouldn’t get depressed about these problems and today’s pace. Just as we shouldn’t get excited about the victory in Monaco.
We need to understand the problems we had yesterday, but today the car was strong in the corners. We were just missing 1 and a half seconds on the straight,” concluded Leclerc
