News: Racing
Team chiefs say failure was not related to Saturday session after crash into the barriers
Ferrari bosses have said that Charles Leclerc’s driveshaft problem at Monaco, which meant he was not able to take up pole position for the race in the principality, was not related to his sizeable crash at the end of the qualifying session.
A rejuvenated Ferrari set the pace in the latter stages of the timed session in Monte Carlo. Several drivers had taken to the track for a final run to improve their times but were thwarted by a red flag following the Monegasque driver’s spill at the Swimming Pool section.
“We need to fully understand what happened,” Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto told Sky Sports
F1. “The failure is on the driveshaft into the hub on the left-hand side. So it’s not a gearbox problem we had. The gearbox had been inspected [on the evening before the race], it has been reviewed, and I think the gearbox was OK for the race. What happened is on the opposite side compared to the accident. So it may be completely unrelated to the accident.
“But something which we need to carefully understand and analyse, and we have no answer right now.”
Leclerc was left frustrated by the failure to start on a weekend when
Ferrari was on the pace throughout all the pre-race sessions. Leclerc said he had brushed with the wall on his pole-winning lap, but took a bigger risk on the final tour which led to the crash. It evoked memories of Ferrari man Michael Schumacher’s faux crash in the dying moments of qualifying in 2006. That, too, caused a red flag and the German was penalised and sent to the back of the grid.
Leclerc explained: “I took too much the inside on my fast lap – if you watch it, I think I touched the wall, too, but not as hard as on the second timed lap. I tried to go for a bit more on the second lap and I basically bounced it off. But it was a misjudgement
“I can tell you that if it was done on purpose, I would have done it a lot more cleverly and not gone at full speed into [the barrier] and risking breaking the gearbox. It was definitely not on purpose.”