Life for Charles Leclerc at the 2022 Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix looked very pleasant as he headed for yet another victory with a comfortable lead over championship rival Max Verstappen who lost a lot of time with a run off the track. at turn 4.
However, on lap 27 , everything changed for the Monegasque, who when he was leading by 11 seconds over George Russell, his engine suddenly began to lose power.
The Ferrari man was forced to go to the pitlane to retire, which left Red Bull free to sign the second double of the year with the triumph of the reigning world champion and with Sergio Pérez on the second step of the podium.
The Italian team still has no answers as to what went wrong with Leclerc’s power unit, and they want to wait until the parts travel to Maranello to start investigating and get to the bottom of the matter before giving a detailed explanation.
However, the head of the most successful team in the history of Formula 1, Mattia Binotto , has confirmed that the problem was not something they could monitor, since it caught them by surprise.
“It was a sudden thing,” said the Swiss. “I think we first found out from Charles [Leclerc] on the radio, and then it was the engineers seeing the data, so it was all at once.”
After two rounds in which Ferrari had a worse pace than Red Bull due to the enormous degradation in the tires, Leclerc considered that things were very different this time, and that his team had everything under control.
When asked if he thought he would have risen to the top without the ruling, he said: “With the laps I’ve done, honestly, everything was going very, very well.”
“I think it would have been difficult for them to recover because, obviously, there was already quite a difference, and we had a good degradation with the soft tires,” assured the Monegasque. “We were able to do quite a few more laps than them, so overall I think we had the race under control.”
