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Charles Leclerc says Ferrari’s sudden Formula 1 reliability crisis is hard to understand given how the team started the 2022 season.
Failures for both Leclerc – in his case a smokey engine problem while leading – and Carlos Sainz made the Ferrari’s the first retirements of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Ferrari customer runners Guanyu Zhou of Alfa Romeo and Kevin Magnussen of Haas also dropped out of the Baku race for mechanical reasons.
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Plumes of smoke coming out of Leclerc's car
Looks like his engine has blown. He's out! 😖#AzerbaijanGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/Ub4ihbtV0m
— Formula 1 (@F1) June 12, 2022
Leclerc’s retirement comes just two race after the same happened while he was leading the Spanish GP.
Having been 34 points clear of the field (and 46 ahead of main title rival Max Verstappen) after the third race of the season in Australia, Leclerc is now heading for a 35-point deficit to Verstappen after Azerbaijan.
“We’ve been fast and we didn’t have big problems in the first part of the season,” Leclerc told Sky.
“Now it seems we have a bit more compared to the beginning of the season, but we haven’t changed massive things. If anything, we made things better.
“So it’s difficult to understand, but we will have to analyse it.
“Obviously, I don’t have the full picture of what happened today, but, personally, again, it hurts.”
Asked by The Race if Ferrari’s problems were getting harder to cope with given Baku was the third consecutive blow after the Barcelona failure and Monaco strategy miscue, Leclerc replied: “It’s just much harder, any DNF is hard obviously, now it’s not the third in row but to be honest Monaco felt like a DNF.
“It’s the third disappointment in a row and it’s not easy.
“But overall I’m confident that mentally I will be as strong as I was five races ago – when I was leading the championship – at the next race.
“The motivation is still there but we need to get on top of those things and obviously reliability is something that we need to look into after the last three races. As a team maybe we need to do a step on that.”
