F1 | Leclerc: “We change engines often, it’s not a very good sign”

Ferrari had not been without points since the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in 2022, so the one in Montreal was a real defeat for the Cavallino, just 14 days after the triumph in Monaco. For Charles Leclerc the Canadian Grand Prix was a real ordeal. After the sensational elimination in Q2, which relegated him to 11th place on the grid, the Monegasque found himself having to deal with a power unit problem right from the very early stages of the race.

A problem that was quantified by the red wall in a loss of around 1″2 per lap, practically all on the straights. At the start of the race, in the wet, Leclerc did what he could to keep his SF-24 at least in the group, even managing to get into the points for a brief interlude, despite having to often change the settings on his steering wheel. Then when the track started to dry there was practically nothing left for him to do, because it was impossible keep his opponents behind.

During a Safety Car caused by Logan Sargeant, Ferrari tried a reset, but also fitted slick tyres. A gamble that didn’t pay off, because after a while the rain started falling again on the Canadian track. At that point, Charles found himself lapped and the team decided to retire the car, because it no longer made too much sense to continue putting kilometers on an engine that had already shown problems.

“The fact that we change engines often is not a very good sign,” Leclerc told Sky Sport F1, underlining that this year there have actually been several rotations with the power units in this first phase of the season. “Having said this, we need to analyze what the problem was today. I don’t know what it is yet, but I was losing 1″5-1″2 on the straights. It was a really difficult race to manage, because then I also had a thousand things to do on the steering”.

“Until the conditions were difficult, we were at the same pace as those around us. Then when the track dried I could take fewer risks than with the wet track and therefore by losing a second and a half I let everyone pass me. There I understood that the race was over,” he added.

On Friday things didn’t seem to be so negative for Ferrari, so the Monegasque was also asked what went wrong then: “Today the problem was the engine and that’s it, because if we remove 1″2 from the pace at the start of the race, we weren’t in very bad shape. Yesterday, however, I believe it is something else that we need to look at and analyze. But yesterday we had already lost the match, then today what happened happened.”