Charles Leclerc has revealed he is in the dark over the anti-stall moment that saw him fail to post a time in SQ3 in Sprint Qualifying at Formula 1’s Austrian Grand Prix.
While Leclerc advanced through to the final segment, he was unable to participate in the one-lap showdown at the death due to an issue that saw him run out of time.
The Monegasque was among the drivers who filtered out, but he pulled his car from the fast lane to a standstill and was stranded as the clock continued to tick down.
Although he was able to get his Ferrari car going again to venture out onto the track, Leclerc missed out on reaching the chequered flag in time to be resigned to 10th.
“I don’t know what happened, I was in the pit lane then I got the anti-stall and everything switched off,” Leclerc explained.
“The team told me we will speak when I’ll be back to the garage but I went straight from the car to here so I don’t know.”
Ferrari seemed to be lagging behind its immediate rivals once again as Carlos Sainz wound up sixth, but Leclerc lamented not having the chance to at least compete.
“We weren’t super strong but yeah definitely better than P10. So it’s a bit disappointing,” Leclerc rued.
“Yeah, we’ll look at what happened and tomorrow we’ll try to have a good Sprint race to come back to the front.”
Meanwhile, Sainz was pleased with the laps he produced across each session, but conceded that Ferrari was unable to extract more pace from the Softs come SQ3.
“I had a decent Sprint quali. I think I was on it since Q1, Q2 and Q3,” Sainz assessed. “Yeah, three very clean laps in qualifying.
Unfortunately, since a race sim in FP1, that on Soft, we look a bit weaker than on mediums or the harder compounds.
“When we put that Soft at the end, from thinking maybe at top three was possible, we are P5.
“But we had the same in FP1 where we were… P6 or something like that on Softs. Something to look into. Unfortunately, right now. This is more or less where we are.”
But the Spaniard, who managed to split the two Mercedes cars on the grid, is holding out hope that he can make progress up the order in the Sprint race tomorrow.
“I’m hoping that we can move forward a little,” he added. “Starting P5, clean side of the grid.
“We’re gonna go for it you know and try and get as maximum points as possible tomorrow and then we have all another quali where we still need to do some fine-tuning on the car.”
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