Fate can be cynical and baroque: unbelievable but true, Charles Leclerc’s career was ruined by Max Verstappen! Although it must be clarified that involuntarily. The world champion detached a tear off from his helmet (a protective sheet of the visor) and ended up obstructing the air intake of the right front brake of the Ferrari of the Monegasque.
The video images of the first lap of the Formula 1 Belgian GP left no room for doubt: the F1-75 suffered an overheating of the brakes and Leclerc was forced to re-enter the pitlane to remove what was preventing cooling of the curve and incidentally change tires. But by then the race was compromised, as he finished at the back of the pack when trying to come back after mounting new elements on his power unit.
Charles Leclerc was just behind Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and the Monegasque was hoping to start a comeback from 15th that could have been similar to the one that put the Dutchman in the lead after just 12 laps.
Obviously, it was not like that and, judging by the level of competitiveness of the Prancing Horse, it is unlikely that Leclerc could have kept up with the world leader, but he could have had a less difficult and convoluted race.
Overheating not only caused a brake fire, but also burned out some of the sensors. To prevent the car from running into trouble, the Monegasque was asked to switch to a recovery system that would isolate failed sensors, allowing the car to continue the race, without the full effectiveness of electronic control.
This was expensive in the last pit stop, when Leclerc exceeded the speed limit and was penalized.
“It wasn’t Charles’s mistake”, explained Binotto, “with the electronic control in the recovery phase, it can happen that the reading of a data is not perfect: the FIA allows up to 80.9 km/h, but we exceeded it! by just 0.1 km/h!”
And after recovering the images from the car’s camera, it became clear that the visor that blocked the Ferrari’s air intake was that of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. Following Lewis Hamilton’s accident there was a lot of confusion in the group as to which drivers put their wheels on the grass and gravel, so the Dutchman was not the only one to remove a foil from his visor before arriving at Blanchimont .
The video of the moment of the incident between Verstappen and Leclerc in Belgium
(Click on the link if it does not appear)
