Charles Leclerc lasted barely two laps into the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix. What was meant to be a shot at a third Monza win in front of the Tifosi instead ended with his Ferrari buried in the barriers at Parabolica, and Ferrari’s home weekend already unravelling before it had properly begun.
A difficult start for Charles Leclerc snowballs
The trouble began before the crash itself. At the first chicane, Leclerc and teammate Lewis Hamilton went wheel to wheel for position, with Hamilton eventually forced wide and dropping down the order to eighth.
Asked about the incident afterwards, Leclerc was keen to play down talk of a rift with his teammate. “I don’t really know who is forcing that narrative that we are one against the other,” he said. “Honestly, on the radio there were way too many talks already.” He did concede the move had gone further than it should have. “It’s true though that we went too far. I think Lewis won that first corner. Then turn two, I tried to do the tightest line possible, but that was just not enough, and doing it there is not good.”
The crash
Two laps in, defending fourth place from McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, Leclerc’s Ferrari stepped out of line at the exit of Parabolica. No contact with another car. The rear of the SF-26 came around, sending Leclerc across the gravel trap and into the outside barriers at high speed.
He climbed from the car unaided, and medical staff checked him over as a precaution. “The neck was okay,” he said when asked how he was feeling. “It was just the vision a little bit at first, the right eye was not showing me great vision, but now it’s all good. That’s the thing I was most worried about getting off the car.” The race was red-flagged to allow repairs to the barrier.
Leclerc was cautious about pinning down a cause. “On the power I felt like the car was quite all right. I went off and went again, there was quite a bit of power then and I lost the car, but I’ve got to look at the data, I haven’t checked it yet,” he said. He returned to the same point when pressed further: “I think from lap one to lap two I had a bit of a difference in power delivery. We’ll look into it, but I don’t want to comment too much before checking the data and confirming it 100%.”
Asked whether he might have been more cautious given the stage of the season and the demands of a home race, he was careful not to get ahead of the analysis. “With hindsight, of course. But again, before making any additional comments, I’d like to look at our side and confirm everything was okay.”
What’s being looked at
Ferrari has yet to confirm a cause. Team principal Fred Vasseur was seen talking with his race engineer afterwards, presumably discussing whether a sudden torque spike played a role.
Separately, Leclerc’s own account points toward the corner exit itself: his car appears to have run close to the drainage grating positioned between the racing surface and the outside kerb, an area of the track that has caught drivers out at Monza before. Reviewing the incident on the Sky Sports broadcast, Nico Rosberg noted that Piastri’s own onboard footage showed his car bouncing over bumps in that same section just moments before Leclerc lost control behind him, suggesting the surface itself may have been a factor regardless of what was happening with the Ferrari’s power delivery.
Rosberg, watching the replay live, was reluctant to settle on a single explanation. “It’s really difficult,” he said. “Only he will know, and I think even he doesn’t know. They need to analyse it.”
Whether the cause was mechanical, a product of the surface at that part of the circuit, the racing line he was forced into while holding off Piastri, or some combination of the three, remains unclear. Ferrari are expected to review the data before Leclerc’s next outing, at the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid.
Gazing forward
For all the frustration, Leclerc was already trying to move past it by the time he spoke to reporters. “It’s very frustrating, but it’s the way it is now. I cannot change the results. I’ll have to look forward and hopefully bounce back in Madrid,” he said, before adding a caveat on what those two laps could actually tell him: “I did two laps in traffic, so it’s very difficult to draw conclusions.”
On what comes next, he was matter-of-fact. “I’ll have quite a few additional checks that we still have to do on my side, probably tonight and tomorrow, to make sure I’ll be fully fine for Madrid. It should be the case, but better be safe than sorry.”
It is a bruising afternoon for Ferrari on home soil: two laps in, and a driver in the barriers. For Leclerc, it continues a run of misfortune at Monza that goes back to a strikingly similar Parabolica crash in 2020.
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