Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Race blow 'significant' for Charles Leclerc title hopes
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Ferrari's Charles Leclerc was forced to retire with engine failure while team-mate Carlos Sainz also failed to finish following a hydraulic failure
Charles Leclerc's championship challenge with Ferrari this year looks increasingly like an illusion.
His retirement from the lead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in a cloud of engine smoke was not only the second time in three races the same thing has happened. It was also the latest in a string of disappointments that have seen an 80-point swing against him in just five races.
"It feels bad, it hurts," Leclerc said, adding: "It is more than significant. I don't really have the words. It is just a huge disappointment and I hope we can jump back from it and be on top of those things."
Three races into this season, Leclerc had scored two wins and a second place, and was leading title rival Max Verstappen by 46 points.
Five races later, Leclerc trails the Red Bull driver by 34 points - a remarkable 80-point turnaround, at an average of 16 points lost on average per race - despite being on pole position for the past four grands prix in a row.
In that time, in addition to the two engine failures, Leclerc has seen his team throw away victory in his home race in Monaco with a bungled strategy, while his own spin in the closing stages at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix turned third place into sixth.
Did Leclerc lose another win in Baku?
Two races ago in Spain, Leclerc seemed on course for a certain victory. Monaco was another win that got away. Was the same the case on Sunday in Baku? That was less clear-cut.
Ferrari's decision to stop Leclerc for fresh tyres under an early virtual safety car put him on an off-set strategy against the Red Bulls.
When Verstappen emerged from his stop nine laps later, he was just under 13 seconds behind and there were 32 laps to go. Could Leclerc have gone fast enough for long enough to keep Verstappen at bay, or was the Red Bull set to catch and pass him?
A second virtual safety car - caused by another Ferrari engine failure, this time in the back of Kevin Magnussen's Haas - meant it was even harder to work out. How this would have affected the race, had Leclerc still been in it, is impossible to know.
Verstappen said: "It would have been a really interesting fight to the end with Charles to see how much we would have caught him, because I think we did have a bit of a pace advantage."
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said he believed Verstappen would have been able to catch and pass Leclerc, and other teams' strategy simulations agreed, suggesting that it would have been close, but Verstappen would have won out.
Leclerc was not so sure. "We were leading and I was managing the tyres well," he said. "We just had to manage the tyres to the end and we were in the best position to do that."
Ferrari 'concern' goes beyond a lost win
In the end, it was all academic. And, ultimately, while another retirement was a major blow to Leclerc's title hopes, of potentially even bigger concern to Ferrari and Leclerc is the problematic situation it creates moving forward.
Leclerc is now certain to be hit by grid penalties for using too many engine parts this season - and the first may well be in Canada this coming weekend.
Leclerc has already reached his maximum allocation of three turbochargers this year.
An entire new power-unit - his second of the year - was fitted to his car in Miami, for the fifth race of the season.
And after his Spain retirement, caused by a failure of the turbocharger and its related hybrid-system component, the MGU-H, Ferrari gave him his third turbo at the start of the Baku weekend. When Ferrari use a fourth turbo on his car, it will mean an automatic 10-place grid penalty.
Of the other components that make up a power-unit, Leclerc still has a leeway of one before a penalty - this time five places - kicks in. Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto admitted on Sunday that Leclerc would need a new engine for Montreal, although he stopped short of confirming that this would mean a grid penalty there.
Whatever happens in Canada, this means that Leclerc will inevitably be hit with at least one further engine-related grid penalty further down the line, given there are still two-thirds of the season to go.
Binotto said: "It is a concern - and even more a concern because I do not have the answer I would like right now as to what was the problem.
"We will need to fit another new engine, it's a fact. It's very early in the season. Sometimes the problems you may have are not short fixes, so I don't know what will be the strategy we need to adopt. Is it shorter mileage or a different type of usage, or a short fix because what happened is a short-fix solution?
"It is something we will understand in the next days and hopefully we will have a clearer answer by the time we are in Canada."
The meaning of those remarks is stark. Binotto is saying that while Ferrari have a reliability concern, they don't at this stage know what its cause is.
Not only that, but if there is not a short-term fix, they will have to change the way they use their engines. That would be by either running less mileage - ie, using more engines, which would mean more penalties - or by running them at a lower performance, which would mean reducing their competitiveness.
Teams are permitted to make changes to their engines for reliability reasons - and the FIA has approved a number of such requests from Ferrari, insiders say. But engine changes have a long lead time, and it is not clear when they will be ready.
What does Verstappen make of all this?
Unsurprisingly, sympathy for his rival was in short supply from Verstappen.
"That's racing," he said. "It happened to me. It happened to many people in the past. Unfortunately, it is happening to Charles.
"It is about how you come out of it. You look at how to improve things. You learn from it. You don't like it. You're angry, but you turn it around and you always have to stay on it because you never know what else might happen."
Verstappen has had his own reliability problems this year, as he pointed out after the race. Leclerc's massive lead after his last victory in Australia back in early April was created by the fact that Verstappen had retired from two of the first three races of the season.
"We had our misfortune in the beginning of the year," Verstappen said. "So we knew that we had to play a bit of catch-up, but then of course it seems like now it's more or less evened out with the bad luck and you have to score points every single weekend if you want to really fight for the championship.
"Everyone knows that. Everyone of course tries that. But it's not always that easy."
The luck has not quite evened out in terms of reliability. Both have had two retirements, yes. But Verstappen's both came when he was running second to Leclerc and his chances of victory were gone; one of Leclerc's cost a certain win; the other a possible one.
Leclerc, perhaps reflecting on the two huge swings this season has already seen, remains optimistic - at least in public - that he can bounce back.
"I am more than frustrated," he said. "It keeps adding up. We need to get on top of these things and hopefully we will be strong in Canada.
"It is not easy but I went through tougher times in my career. Mentally, I will be there. I am still as motivated as five races ago when I was leading with quite a big margin. The championship is long and I still believe in it as much as I did in the last few races but we need to get on top of those things."
As for Ferrari's title hopes, Binotto said: "It is not something we are looking at. We are focused on ourselves and trying to get the most out of race weekends.
"We know to get to the top, there is still a gap. We had some problems at the last events and we are simply focusing on trying to improve ourselves.
"We have another step required right now. I would rather have good performance and try to fix reliability than vice versa."
And, perhaps thinking of that looming new engine, he rejected a suggestion that Leclerc needed to win in Canada to get his title challenge back on track.
"I don't think it is a must-win at all," Binotto said. "We will be focused race by race to optimise our potential. Today something went wrong. Lesson learned, try to understand, move forward and try to do it as soon as possible.
"Reliability is a key element of overall performance. To finish first, first you have to finish and we are not yet there."
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