Yahoo Autos Leclerc perplexed by SQ3 issue that prevented attempt
Charles Leclerc says he doesn’t know what caused his car to shut down in the pit lane and prevented him from setting a lap time in SQ3 at the Austrian Grand Prix.
The final part of sprint qualifying saw all 10 drivers waiting until the final few minutes to start the one attempt, both to save a set of tires but also due to the lack of time to go out and complete two runs in most of the shortened sessions. Leclerc had left the Ferrari garage but then came to a halt in the pit lane before moving once again, but he just ran out of time to start a timed lap before the checkered flag came out.
“I don’t know what happened,” Leclerc said. “I was in the pit lane and I got the anti-stall and then everything switched off.
“We weren’t super strong, but definitely better than P10 [was possible] so it’s a bit disappointing. But we’ll look at what happened and tomorrow we’ll try to have a good sprint race to come back to the front.”
Teammate Carlos Sainz secured fifth place on the grid for Saturday’s sprint, but says there is work to do ahead of the main qualifying session too.
“I had a decent sprint qualifying, I think I was on it since Q1, Q2 and Q3,” Sainz said. “Three very clean laps in qualifying. Unfortunately, already in FP1 on softs we look a bit weaker than on the harder compounds, and then when we put that soft on at the end, from maybe thinking top three was possible, we are P5.
“But we had the same in FP1 where we were P6 or something like that on softs, so something to look into. Unfortunately, right now this is more or less where we are.
“I’m hoping that we can move forward a little. Starting P5, clean side of the grid, we’re going to go for it and try to get as maximum points as possible tomorrow. And then we have another qualifying where we still need to do some fine-tuning on the car.”
