The Monegasque driver has twice crashed at Turn 7 this weekend, first losing the car in second practice on Friday before the rear snapped and he span into the barrier in Q3.
The resulting red flag left Sergio Perez on pole ahead of Fernando Alonso, while Leclerc’s banker lap placed him seventh with 2022 championship rival Max Verstappen in ninth.
Leclerc explained on Saturday that he took a risk with the set-up and, although he remains convinced that opting for a “difficult” setup was the best way to extract the maximum from his Ferrari SF-23, he may have gone too far with that direction.
He acknowledged that he was being hard on himself after his mistake and conveyed his disappointment to crash out in qualifying.
“For sure I’m very disappointed with myself,” he said. “Same mistake as [Friday] in the same corner. I also know that qualifying is my strong point and obviously I am taking more risk.
“In Q3 that pays off nine times out of 10. But obviously this is a weekend where twice I put it in the wall, and this is just not the level where I want to be.
“I obviously need to, in those weekends especially, just manage it differently in Q3. But at the end it’s like this.
“I think I put myself also in a difficult situation because I wanted a very aggressive setup for qualifying, knowing that this was a setup I will need to extract the most out of the car. I probably did a step too far, and this is something I’ll look at after the weekend.
“We know we have a weakness in terms of tailwind. Whenever we have tailwind, we suffer more from other cars. But I wanted that car to be very tricky because I knew that’s the way you need to drive this car. And today, it was too much.”
Ferrari has subsequently changed the rear wing, gearbox, floor and rear suspension on the SF-23, although the new parts have come from the allocated pool so will not incur a grid penalty.
Leclerc’s driver coach Jock Clear implied the cause of the shunt was driver error, rather than rear-end instability triggered by a bump or an aerodynamic characteristic.
The crash damaged Charles Leclerc Ferrari SF-23 is returned to the pits on the back of a truck
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
He said: “In some ways, this maybe is a reflection of his mindset when he is up against a car that is demonstrably quicker than him [like the Red Bull].
“It’s a sort of: ‘I’m just going to have to make the difference myself’. Of course, physics ultimately catches you…
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