'No power, no power!' Leclerc explains Bahrain GP retirement
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F1 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix – Full Race results from Round 1Leclerc stopped on track on Lap 41 of Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix after his engine suddenly cut out – a worrying return for reliability issues which blighted 2022 for Ferrari.The Monegasque reported he had “no power” as he ground to a halt after running in third place behind the Red Bull duo of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez. A Ferrari spokesperson said “we seem to have lost the engine on Charles’ car”.It marks a huge setback to Leclerc after Ferrari had already been forced to take on a new energy store before the first race of the season.
Leclerc has already used up 50 percent of his energy store allocation for the year and could be set for further engine headaches down the line, given his failure in Bahrain. “I couldn’t do anything after that,” he said after revealing there was “zero” warning of his engine shutdown.“We need to keep working because obviously first race and first reliability problems, so not good.”Asked about his race before retiring, he said: “I mean, as confident as I can be being a second off the pace, which is not really confident to be honest.“Red Bull seems to have found something really big during the race pace. In terms of qualy pace, they are actually pretty similar to us or at least we managed to extract the lap time yesterday, but then we come to the race and we are a second every lap off the pace, which is huge.Related Hamilton’s stark team radio message underlines scale of Mercedes task Hamilton wants Merc gains: ‘Anything from the wind tunnel, we need it!’“Bahrain is also a very specific track, so I hope that the picture can change a little bit from the next race, but we cannot rely on that, we need to work and find something.“So, we really need to work into that, plus the reliability.”Max Verstappen won the first race of the season.
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