Leclerc: Ferrari’s China disqualification caused by “playing with the limit”

Ferrari’s loss of both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton from the Chinese Grand Prix was a factor of the team pushing to overcome performance deficit to dominant McLaren

Ferrari aims to learn from the “pain” of having both its cars disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix but its key challenge is to make up the gap to McLaren, says Charles Leclerc.

While Leclerc’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton won the sprint race in Shanghai, Ferrari regards that result as an outlier and is expecting its form at the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend to be more in line with where it was on the Sunday in China.

There, Hamilton and Leclerc qualified fifth and sixth, ran fourth and fifth for most of the opening stint, but were passed by Max Verstappen as the Red Bull came alive on the hard-compound tyres in the second stint. Afterwards both Ferraris were disqualified – Leclerc for being marginally underweight, Hamilton for illegal skid plank wear.

“Obviously whenever you do mistakes you learn from them, especially when they’re costing that much,” said Leclerc in the pre-race press conference at Suzuka.

“Everybody is playing with the limit and trying to be as close as possible to it, but to have both cars underneath [i.e. beyond] it was a big pain, and at the end of the day we didn’t need that. It’s been a very difficult first part of the season, the first two races were very difficult, the pace wasn’t where we expected it to be.

“To lose more points than we already did [through underperforming in Melbourne] hurts the team a lot.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Philip Fong - AFP - Getty Images

Both these technical infractions are consequences of running as close as possible to the permitted tolerances. Carrying too much margin – in terms of ballast or ride height in these cases – costs fractions of a second or more per lap and Ferrari was unlucky, perhaps even slightly careless, to inadvertently stray over the boundaries with both cars.

Hamilton’s disqualification was, in effect, unavoidable from the moment the car set off from the grid at a smooth track where the drivers spend little time riding the kerbs. But Leclerc’s was potentially avoidable – it was notable, for instance, that Verstappen was careful to spend as much time as possible on his cool-down lap off the racing line, picking up spent rubber on the outside of his tyres.

Whether Verstappen was reminded to do this or not, it’s an indicator of how Ferrari and Leclerc could potentially have avoided disqualification when the margins are this tight – Leclerc’s car was just 1kg underweight.

“I’m confident that we’ll learn from it,” said Leclerc. “Obviously when events like this happen, we try to understand and analyse where it went wrong, and change a little bit the process.

“It was a multitude of things adding up which meant the margin we had wasn’t big enough.”

While running close to the limits is standard practice in Formula 1, going over them – with both cars – is indicative of the current state of play, where McLaren has a dominant (if occasionally tricky) car, and Ferrari lies some way back in a chasing pack where its position relative to Mercedes and Red Bull is more fluid.

Although the ground-effect ruleset introduced in 2022 has now reached a state of maturity, and the gaps between different cars are diminishing as performance converges, there is still a spread. Closing these gaps is not just a question of fiddling with set-up or drivers adjusting their styles – each car has a performance ceiling.

“It’s as difficult as always – it’s always tricky to extract maximum performance from a car,” said Leclerc. “I don’t think it’s any more difficult in a season like this.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

“It’s just that the performance compared with McLaren specifically is just not good enough. So it’s not about how hard it is to extract the maximum performance out of the car, it’s just that there’s not enough performance in the car for now.

“But little step by little step I’m sure we can close that gap – starting from this weekend, hopefully.”

At this stage in the season there will still be car developments in the works. But lead times on more critical components are such that even the best-resourced teams are still some way from responding definitively to events in the opening rounds – although Haas is applying a tweak to its floor this weekend.

As such, Ferrari – like the other teams – is still learning about its car. To an extent, performances will vary according to track configurations, weather conditions and race circumstances, which is why Ferrari regards its performance in the sprint race in China as an outlier.

Indeed, it made set-up changes to both cars after Hamilton’s victory in the sprint, with the principal aim of preserving tyre performance in the substantially longer grand prix.

“We saw a big step on Saturday [in China], in the sprint race with Lewis especially,” said Leclerc. “On Sunday I think it was back to normal.

“[This weekend] I expect us to be more in line with China on the Sunday than in Melbourne.”