Charles Leclerc cites power unit glitch for subdued Azerbaijan GP start

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc has revealed that he struggled with a power unit issue during the opening phases of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

This led to a modest start as the Monegasque started 10th on the grid. While Red Bull's Max Verstappen won a dominant race, Leclerc and his team-mate Lewis Hamilton finished ninth and eighth, respectively. 

Leclerc struggled behind a tight midfield pack headed by Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda on a track that has limited opportunities to convert a tyre offset into track position. 

“Yeah, I think it was a bit of a roll of the dice to get the right strategy today. I mean, the medium-hard or hard-medium was kind of the same. I mean, it was obviously the same on paper. And then you will just hope that you were with the most amount of fast cars on the same strategy, and I ended up with, obviously, Liam, which was very strong in the straight, very strong in the last sector, and very difficult to overtake, even on the cars that had reverse strategy, and I got stuck behind him the whole race.

"So it was very frustrating. But yeah, good job to him. And at the end of the day, the only thing I can do is to be harsh with myself and not having performed the way I should have yesterday in qualifying, obviously with a mistake in Q3. It’s been a very strong season so far, but this weekend I haven’t been on the level where I should be, and I pay the price of it today.”

This was not helped by an intermittent power unit issue that caused him to lose power during the opening 10 laps of his Baku campaign.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

"Unfortunately, I had a quite big power unit issue for like 10 laps in the first stint, and we don’t really know what is the reason for that yet because it kind of came back from one lap to the other and we don’t know what happened," he said.

"So I need more info about that. It’s not like it’s been there for the whole race, so then I was fine towards the end, but in the phase where I think we probably had the chance to actually overtake cars, I was just stuck in the DRS and very slow down the straight, so I couldn’t do much in that first phase after that.”

The Ferrari drivers scored just six points in Azerbaijan, with Leclerc looking forward to a warmer Singapore race in a couple of weeks.

"I think our car is struggling quite a bit whenever it's cold, and we have seen that the Mercedes is performing very, very strongly whenever it's cold. Yesterday, there was one of the only cars that had actually made the medium work in Q3, together with Williams, actually, which are both cars very strong in cold conditions.

"We are stronger in hot conditions, which I hope Singapore will give us that."

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur weighed in on the power unit issue that plagued his driver's race.

"Charles, he had the issue on the engine - it was not five tenths a lap, but it was enough to spend your week behind someone and not to be able to overtake.

"And then the cost is not the two tenths that you are losing on the engine, it's the two tenths plus the gap with the car in front of you. That, for Charles, was a lot I think, but at the end of the day, the conclusion of this is not - because it's true for us, but it's true for Norris - is that if we lost something it was yesterday, not today."