Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur says the engine failure which put Charles Leclerc out of the Bahrain Grand Prix was completely unexpected.
The team changed two parts on Leclerc’s car during the build-up to the race – his control electronics and energy store – after inspecting the data from his power unit. But his stoppage two-thirds of the way through the race caught them completely by surprise.
“Honestly we don’t know yet what’s happened exactly,” said Vasseur. “There’s been an issue this morning, we changed the parts, we don’t know where it’s coming from and we’ll have the investigation soon. But it’s too early stage for me to give you a better answer.”
During the winter Ferrari focused on eliminating the reliability problems which undermined their 2022 campaign. There was no prior indication of the fault which brought Leclerc’s race to an end.
“We never expected to have something like this because it’s the first time that we had it,” said Vasseur. “We didn’t face the same issue at all during the six or seven thousand kilometres that we did with the engines last week with the three teams. And we never had the same issue on the dyno throughout the winter.
“But again, we need to do a full investigation before to be able to give you a proper answer.”
The sudden failure of Leclerc’s engine capped a race which was already proving a disappointment for Ferrari. Having shown promising pace in qualifying, Leclerc was unable to mount a serious threat to Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and lost the place he gained from the team’s other car, driven by Sergio Perez.
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“Overall, I would say that the picture is not the one expected before the race,” said Vasseur. “If I want to summarise the situation I would say that from the quali pace we are there, we are matching Red Bull, at least in Bahrain, and it was a positive point.
“But now we have to be realistic. If we want to improve, we need to have a clear picture of the situation and the reliability is not at the level that we need. If we want to win races, we need to have a clean sheet on the weekend and not small details here and there.
“[On] degradation, I think Charles would have been able to finish P3. But the degradation is probably at the level of the Mercedes and not far away of matching with Alonso but not at the level [required].”
Red Bull ran a more aggressive strategy than Ferrari, doing two stints on…
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