Charles Leclerc reveals cause of heated ‘not driving this car any more’ radio message

Charles Leclerc has revealed Ferrari did find a problem with a part on his car that led to him heatedly telling the team he’s “not driving this car any more” during FP2 in Baku.

Leclerc had a mixed day on Friday in Azerbaijan when, sitting at the top of the timesheet in the opening practice hour, he crashed nose-first at Turn 15.

Charles Leclerc, from the barriers to P1

Ferrari put his car back together in time for FP2 but that didn’t get off to the best start for the Monegasque driver.

“Check the data but I think the car is bent somewhere,” he told Ferrari.

But told his SF-24 is fine, Leclerc stayed out on track before heatedly saying a short while later: “I’m not driving this car any more. I’m pitting. It’s impossible that you cannot see that on data!”

Returning to the pits, the on-goings inside Leclerc’s garage were blocked by a wall of red as the team worked on his car before sending him back out.

He went on to finish FP1 fastest of all by a mere 0.006s ahead of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez.

Leclerc revealed Ferrari found a problem with one of the parts they’d fitted while repairing his car.

More from Friday’s running in Baku

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👉 Azerbaijan GP: Max Verstappen misses top five as Charles Leclerc mounts FP2 fightback

“The crash, there’s not much to go into,” he said as per the official F1 website. “I braked a little bit too much on the right, the track was still dirty, I locked up and it was too late to go to the right [run-off] – so I went into the wall.

“That wasn’t great to start the weekend, but I still had a lot of confidence in the car, so there wasn’t much problem.

“Then the thing is that when we started FP2 there was an actual problem on the car that we saw later on, once I stopped, and we changed that particular part.

“It was nothing to do with the crash before, so the mechanics have done a really good job. We just had a problem with one new part that we had just put on the car.

“I won’t go too much into details but that was obviously giving me a very strange feeling with the steering wheel.

“We changed that, went again and then it was fine. It was not as many laps as what I would have hoped for on this Friday, but competitive anyway.”

Looking ahead to Saturday’s action and the prospect of clinching a fourth pole position in Baku, Leclerc said: “It’s very tight [at the front], but it’s very difficult to see also with different engine modes of everybody.

“It’s one of the tracks that I quite like and we’ve been pretty quick in the past, but that doesn’t mean it will be the case for tomorrow.

“We still have to work on the car, there’s plenty to do to improve. There’s the driving to be improved quite a bit, because I was still taking a little bit my references in FP2, but again, we are fast, so that’s a good sign. Hopefully just more to come tomorrow.”

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