Up Next
A leaking water bottle has emerged as one of the factors that contributed to Charles Leclerc’s disqualification from Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix.
Leclerc lost his fifth placed finish in Shanghai two weeks ago after his F1 car was found to be one kilogramme under the 800kg weight limit during post-race checks.
Ferrari initially suggested the car being too light came from excessive tyre wear caused by Leclerc running a one-stop tyre strategy.
However, this is unlikely to have been the sole reason and account for all the missing mass – especially with drivers regularly picking up marbles to account for any wear after the chequered flag, and Leclerc's strategy not being an outlier.
It is understood that Pirelli’s initial inspections of Leclerc’s tyres back at its Milan base have not shown an anomaly compared to tyres that ran to a similar distance on other cars.
Now, Ferrari too has admitted a host of other factors came into play that ultimately meant the squad miscalculated things.
Speaking to French newspaper L’Equipe, Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur said: “It's not just that. The tyres are only part of the explanation.
“We also lost a litre of water with Charles's drinking [bottle] leaking. The loss of weight is always an addition of many small factors.”
Under normal conditions, one litre of water should weigh 1kg, so the leak will have accounted for a decent amount of what was missing in the end.
A fully worn down set of tyres that have been able to collect shed rubber after the race should be around 1kg lighter in total - but teams should be factoring this in anyway.
Ferrari admits ride height error
Leclerc’s disqualification came on top of Lewis Hamilton being stripped of sixth place in China because the plank on his car had worn down too much.
Ferrari admits it made a mistake in not running Hamilton’s car high enough in the Chinese GP to avoid the skid being worn down.
But Vasseur has said that, with the fine margins that everyone is having to play with at the moment, such disqualifications are the price to be paid if teams want to be successful.
“You have to distinguish between disqualification because you're taking risks and disqualification because someone is cheating,” he added.
“The aim of the game in F1 is to push yourself to the limit of all parameters, everywhere.
“To get to the last gramme of weight, to get to the last tenth of a millimetre of the skid, to get to the last millimetre of wing deformation.
“So it's certain that the more pressure you're under, the more intense the fight, the closer you need to get to these limits and the more risks you take.”
While the disappointment of the double disqualification was clear, Hamilton himself said the squad’s response to what happened had impressed him.
“We've gone through everything - I was at the factory on Wednesday - and [there are] lots of learnings,” he said.
“We take the highs and lows together as a team and obviously it's not what everyone's worked hard to have happen on a race weekend. No team - no engineer, no mechanic - puts all the effort in for something like that.
“But I'd say the most impressive thing is how the team have taken it and how they've worked, how they've churned through the data, how we progress from here. That is the most important.”
Hamilton losing faith is rubbish
Hamilton also moved to quickly deny any suggestion that Ferrari’s worst start to a Formula 1 season in more than a decade had made him question the team.
“I saw someone sent me something of whether I'm losing faith in the team, which is complete rubbish,” he said.
“I have absolute 100% faith in this team. There was obviously a huge amount of hype at the beginning of the year, and I don't know if everyone was expecting us to be winning from race one and winning the championship in the first year. That wasn't my expectation.
“I know that I'm coming into a new culture, a new team, it's going to take time. I've spent the past two months just observing how the team works in comparison to the other two teams that I've worked at and through this past week, I've been able to make notes and create pointers of areas I feel like we can improve on.
"And that will continue through the year as we learn more and more about each other.”
From Leclerc’s perspective, the start to the year has been far from ideal but he was also far from downbeat about things.
“Everybody plays with the limit and tries to be as close as possible to it,” he said. “But to have both cars underneath it was a big pain. We didn’t need that.
“It’s been a very difficult first part of the season. The first two races were difficult, the pace was not where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, it hurts the team a lot.
“I’m confident we’ve learned from it. Whenever these kind of events happen, we try to understand and analyse what went wrong and change a little bit the process.
"It was a multitude of things adding up, and the margin we took wasn’t big enough.”
