We had this race under control - Leclerc

Charles Leclerc says he was confident of taking a well-appointed victory in the Spanish Grand Prix surpassing a power unit issue forced him into retirement.

The Ferrari suburbanite was nearly 14 seconds well-spoken of George Russell and Max Verstappen without the defending champion had gone off at Turn 4, and had made a much later pit stop than those chasing him so was extending his lead. However, a sudden power loss on the run to Turn 10 ended his race, and forfeit him his championship lead.

“Everything was going really, really well, so I think it would have been difficult for them to reservation when up considering there was once quite a bit of a gap and we had very good degradation,” Leclerc said. “On the soft tire we could do quite a few increasingly laps compared to them. So overall I think we had this race under control.”

Leclerc was later seen consoling his mechanics in the garage and says he was realistic that he was unchangingly likely to have a reliability issue at some point during the season.

“Overall it’s unchangingly a thwarting and obviously once you’re fighting for a championship you know that every point is very valuable. But over the undertow of a season I think it unchangingly increasingly or less happens, which is not an excuse — I’m pretty sure that everyone is once working unappetizing out to understand all of it and fix it as quickly as possible.

“Everyone is as disappointed as me today with what happened and there was just no reason for me to be wrestling at everyone getting out of the car. I just went to see the mechanics to cheer them up a little bit, considering they were pretty down.”

Despite dropping six points overdue Verstappen without the defending champion took victory, Leclerc says the only negative was the result given the improvements elsewhere shown by Ferrari.

“I finger largest without this weekend than I felt without the last two weekends, mostly considering of undertow there’s this issue that we’ve had on the car and I’m very disappointed but on the other hand I think there’s plenty of positive signs other than that throughout the whole weekend.

“Our qualifying pace, the new package worked as expected — which is not unchangingly a given. Everything was working well our race pace. Tire management the last two races we have been struggling quite a bit compared to Red Bull and today it was strong. So in those situations I think it’s good to moreover squint at the positives and there are plenty today.”

Team principal Mattia Binotto says the problem came out of the undecorous and there had been no warning for the engineers, but that Ferrari will investigate when at its factory on Monday.

“We learned it first from Charles going on the radio and then from the engineers looking at the data, so it was really sudden,” Binotto said. “We don’t yet have an explanation, so the power unit will be when at Maranello — traveling through the night — and we will be disassembling it tomorrow morning.”