Charles Leclerc has revealed that Ferrari has indeed identified a problem with part of his car, leading to him heatedly telling the team during FP2 in Baku that he will “not drive this car anymore”.

Leclerc had a mixed day in Azerbaijan on Friday. He was at the top of the timesheets in the first hour of practice, but then he crashed nose-first at Turn 15.

Charles Leclerc, from the barrier to P1

Ferrari had reassembled its car in time for FP2, but it was not exactly the best start for the Monegasque driver.

“Check the data, but I think the car is bent somewhere,” he told Ferrari.

But after being told that his SF-24 was OK, Leclerc stayed on the track before declaring heatedly: “I’m not driving this car anymore. I’m going to the pits. It’s impossible not to see that in the data!”

When he returned to the pits, the action in Leclerc’s garage was blocked by a red wall as the team worked on his car before sending him back out.

He finished FP1 fastest of all, just 0.006 seconds ahead of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez.

Leclerc announced that while repairing his car, Ferrari discovered a problem with one of the parts they had installed.

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“There’s not much to say about the accident,” he said, according to the official F1 website. “I braked a little too hard on the right, the track was still dirty, I blocked and it was too late to move to the right (run-off area) – so I flew into the wall.”

“It wasn’t a great start to the weekend, but I still had a lot of confidence in the car, so there weren’t any major problems.

“Then the thing was this: when we started the second free practice session, there was a real problem with the car. We only noticed it later when I stopped and we replaced the relevant part.

“It had nothing to do with the previous accident, so the mechanics did a really good job. We just had a problem with a new part that we had just fitted to the car.

“I won’t go into too much detail, but the steering wheel obviously gave me a very strange feeling.

“We changed that, drove again and then it was OK. It wasn’t as many laps as I had hoped for that Friday, but it was still competitive.”

Looking ahead to Saturday’s action and the prospect of taking his fourth consecutive pole position in Baku, Leclerc said: “It’s very close (at the front) but it’s also very difficult to see because everyone has a different engine mode.”

“It’s one of the tracks I quite like and we’ve been quite fast in the past, but that doesn’t mean it will be the case tomorrow.

“We still have to work on the car, there is a lot to improve. The driving still needs to be improved a lot, because I stuck to my references a little in FP2, but we are fast, that is a good sign. Hopefully there will be more tomorrow.”

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