Ferrari reveal costly reason behind Leclerc disqualification

Sam Cook
Tuesday 24 October 2023 16:57

Ferrari's sporting director Diego Ioverno has said that the "bumpiness" of the Austin track, as well as the sprint weekend format, were what led to Charles Leclerc's disqualification from the United States Grand Prix.

Both Leclerc and seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton were disqualified at the conclusion of the race after they were found to have excessive wear on their skid blocks.

Rules state that if the plank shows wear of more than 1mm, the driver of that car will be disqualified. The stewards found Hamilton and Leclerc to be in breach of the rules and subsequently made the decision to disqualify them.

It meant that Hamilton was stripped of his second-place position after a race in which he posed a serious challenge to Max Verstappen, while Leclerc's sixth-place was also scratched off.

For Ferrari, it worked out fairly well in that Carlos Sainz was promoted onto the podium, and they left Austin having closed the gap to Mercedes in the constructors' championship.

Now, Ioverno has revealed in a video on Ferrari's official X, formerly known as Twitter, page how exactly the disqualification came about.

"What happened? It happened that technical regulations clearly state that, at the end of the race, there are some measurements that have to be respected for the bottom parts of the car, parts of the car that are used to protect the car from grabbing asphalt," he said.

"At the end of the race measurement, our car was below the minimum threshold for a few tenths, but enough to bring the stewards to consider illegal our position."

Ioverno: Weekend 'very peculiar'

With the US GP being a sprint weekend, teams only had one practice session on Friday before jumping straight into qualifying, and then a jam-packed Saturday and Sunday schedule.

This played havoc with a lot of teams, including Aston Martin, whose issues in practice threw them off for the rest of the weekend.

Now, Ioverno has said that this was also the case for Ferrari, who were caught out by needing to make changes to Leclerc's car.

"The sprint weekend is very peculiar, you have very little time to prepare the car," he added.

"Basically only one session in FP1, and then you go into parc ferme meaning, from that moment onwards, you cannot touch the car any longer.

"On top of this, Austin is a super nice track but is extremely bumpy. Bumpiness is a difficult topic for drivers and for cars, in the past more or less everyone failed the suspensions, failed the chassis.

"We knew it would have been tricky, and this is the reason why we also lifted the car throughout FP1, and from our consideration, it should have been OK.

"As a matter of fact, it turned out we were, anyhow, too marginal, and also because of the wind which changed direction and had a stronger intensity than what was forecasted. This brought our car to not the legal at the end."

READ MORE: F1 skid blocks explained: Why were Hamilton and Leclerc disqualified from United States GP?