Brake supplier Brembo has issued an extraordinary statement after Ferrari Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc put his Monaco Grand Prix crash down to his “nightmare” braking woes.
While the track surface was breaking up at the final corner, Antony Noghes, where Leclerc and Aston Martin driver Lance Stroll crashed, Leclerc put his incident down to the brakes on his Ferrari SF-26, which he has struggled with across the two most recent races in Montreal and Monaco in particular.
“I don’t know how much I can go into the details, but…I don’t think…it’s just not acceptable,” Lelerc said after his exit.
“The issues I have faced with my brakes have been…it’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that in this particular moment, it’s just impossible.
“I cannot do anything. The only thing I can do is not brake for the last corner, but in an F1 corner not braking in the last corner ends up in the wall anyway. I put the least amount of brakes I could possibly do, and it’s not even braking, it’s leaning my foot on the brake.”
He claimed that “out of the four brakes, I had three brakes not working” at the time of the crash and said it was like “the callipers were not even in the car”, but had not experienced “those problems, at least to that extent” until the race was neutralised for Stroll’s crash.
“The problem was the safety car. As soon as I did the safety car, three of my four brakes stopped working. I could never switch them on again, nothing was working anymore,” Leclerc said.
“I tried to do many actions in the car to try and help it. The only solution I had was to not brake in the last corner, but I would have crashed in Turn 1.
“There’s no way I could have done a lap, there was just no solution, so we’ll have to look into it.
“I don’t know if it was a wear issue, it’s often a problem here. I don’t know what it was, but there was a clear issue.”
Leclerc said “I think it’s very clear for everyone, I don’t think there’s any doubt” about what the issue was.
But Brembo, Ferrari’s long-term brake supplier, responded to Leclerc’s comments with a strong statement after the race.
“Brembo Group is really surprised by the statements made by Charles Leclerc after F1’s Monaco Grand Prix,” it read.
“The partnership between Brembo and Scuderia Ferrari has continued for more than 50 years and also extends to other brands within the Group, including AP Racing clutches and Ohlins dampers, confirming the strength and breadth of this long-standing collaboration.
“At present, the company does not know the causes of the issues experienced by Charles Leclerc and therefore considers it premature to draw definitive technical conclusions before the available data has been analysed.
“In cases such as this, it is necessary to examine the telemetry data together with the team’s engineers in order to accurately determine the origin of the incident.
“Brembo is a benchmark in F1 and is present on every car on the grid through its braking technologies. Over the years, F1 teams have continued to choose Brembo solutions, recognising their reliability, innovation and world-class performance.
“The group will continue to invest in innovation, reliability and performance, while continuing its collaboration with Scuderia Ferrari and all other F1 teams.”
Leclerc said he will now move to team-mate Lewis Hamilton’s brake configuration.
“The only thing I can say is that we have the solution in-house, and I’ll go to Lewis’s configuration from the next race onwards, which hopefully will be a step,” he said. “But it’s been a nightmare.”
Leclerc did accept some blame for not making such a change sooner.
“I didn’t really want to change this weekend, and for that maybe I am to blame in a way that I thought on a track like this, in Monaco, it was good to start with brakes that I knew,” Leclerc said.
“Considering the issues I’ve dealt with, and that there are no solutions on a track like this, there’s not much to say.”