Charles Leclerc said his Ferrari team “threw everything in the bin” as his front tyres were too cold when he left the pits to start his crucial final lap in Q3 in Singapore.
The Ferrari driver locked up in Turn 1 and ran wide, and having done a time that was good enough for fourth lost it to a track limits deletion.
He will thus start Sunday evening’s race from ninth, a place ahead of team mate Carlos Sainz, who crashed at the start of Q3.
On his in-lap he made it clear on team radio that tyre temperature was the issue.
“Q1 and Q2 was going well,” he said when asked about the session by formu1a.uno. “I was kind of hopeful again after FP3 that went wrong.
“But then I got out of the box in Q3, and the front tyres were way cooler. So I don’t know.
“We do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali, where we know it’s as important as Monaco, and we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres, and that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place. So not much to say.”
Along with Lando Norris Leclerc was the pacesetter on Friday, but he struggled in FP3 ahead of qualifying.
“In FP3, I was not happy with the car,” he admitted. “But also it’s very warm weather here, so I was expecting it to be not exactly where we want it to be.
“But we were expecting to have a strong quali, which in Q1 and Q2 we did confirm that we were in the pace to do a good thing.
“And then we throw everything in the bin with the Q3 tyre temperature issues. So we’ve got to investigate that.
“I have asked to the team in the in-lap. I think the investigations are still ongoing, and we don’t know the exact issue yet, but fact is, we started the lap with two cold front tyres locked up into Turn 1, and that was it. I never really had the front grip I wanted.”
Regarding the scale of the temperature deficit he said: “I’m not going to go into the detail of the numbers. Obviously we are speaking about one degree, maximum two degree to get it right or completely wrong. So it was more than that, and there was nothing to do.”
