Charles Leclerc insisted the problem which forced him to stop running during second practice was not related to his crash in the earlier session.
The Ferrari driver hit the barrier at turn 15 during the first practice session, badly damaging the front of his car.
“I braked a little bit too much on the right,” Leclerc explained afterwards. “The track was still dirty, I locked up and it was too late to go to the right so I went into the wall.
“So that wasn’t great to start the weekend. But I still had a lot of confidence in the car so there wasn’t much problem then.”
His team fixed the car in order for Leclerc to take part in second practice, but he soon noticed a problem with his car.
“Is everything okay on data?” Leclerc asked his team. “For now, we don’t see anything strange,” replied his race engineer Bryan Bozzi.
However soon afterwards Leclerc took it upon himself to bring the car back into the pits. “I’m not driving with this car any more,” he said. “I’m pitting. It’s impossible that you cannot see that on data. It’s completely… it’s not straight.”
Leclerc said this problem was not related to the repair job his team performed after first practice.
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“When we started FP2 there was an actual problem on the car that we saw,” he told the official F1 channel. “Later on, once I stopped, we changed that particular part.
“It was nothing to do with the crash before. The mechanics had done a really good job, but we just had a problem on one new part that we had just put on the car. I won’t go too much into details, but that was obviously giving me a very strange feeling with the steering wheel.
“We changed that, went again and then it was fine. So then it was okay. Just not as many laps as what I would have hoped for this Friday, but competitive anyway.”
The Ferrari driver set the fastest lap time of the day, six-thousandths of a second quicker than Sergio Perez managed in the Red Bull, once he returned to the track. Although the competition at the top of the times looks close, Leclerc believes there is more to come from his car following his disrupted day.
“It’s very tight but it’s very difficult to see also with the different engine modes of everybody,” he said. “It’s one of the tracks that I quite like and we’ve been pretty quick in the past, but that doesn’t mean it will be the case for tomorrow.
“So we still have to work on…
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