Aggressive Ferrari set-up for Miami F1 qualifying “a step too far”

Charles Leclerc says the aggressive set-up for his Ferrari Formula 1 car was a “step too far”, which led to his Miami Grand Prix qualifying crash.

Leclerc endured an error-strewn Q3 session in his bid for a second successive pole position, stunting his first lap in the final part of qualifying with a lock-up at Turn 17 that only yielded the seventh-fastest time following the first set of runs.

Attempting to find more laptime, Leclerc lost control of the rear of his car at the sweeping Turn 6/7 and spun into the wall, almost repeating his FP2 crash when he locked up and ploughed straight into the barrier in the final part of the session.

The Monegasque explained that he took a risk with the set-up and, although he remains convinced that opting for a “difficult” set-up was the best way to extract the maximum from his Ferrari SF-23, he may have gone too far with that direction.

He acknowledged that he was being hard on himself after his mistake and conveyed his disappointment to crash out in qualifying.

“For sure I’m very disappointed with myself,” he said. “Same mistake as yesterday in the same corner. I also know that qualifying is my strong point and obviously I am taking more risk.

“In Q3 that pays off nine times out of 10. But obviously this is a weekend where twice I put it in the wall, and this is just not the level where I want to be.

“I obviously need to, in those weekends especially, just manage it differently in Q3. But at the end it’s like this.

“I think I put myself also in a difficult situation because I wanted a very aggressive set-up for qualifying, knowing that this was a set-up I will need to extract the most out of the car. I probably did a step too far, and this is something I’ll look at after the weekend.

“We know we have a weakness in terms of tailwind. Whenever we have tailwind, we suffer more from other cars. But I wanted that car to be very tricky because I knew that’s the way you need to drive this car. And today, it was too much.”

Carlos Sainz, who qualified third for the Miami race, also concluded that the 2023 Ferrari was difficult to drive, particularly around the high-speed corners.

He added that he had his own “moments” in those areas of the circuit, but that he and Leclerc were pushing to be on the limit with the set-up of the car.

“I had my moments through the high-speed section also in FP3, which kind of confirms that the car around there, it’s just very tricky,” Sainz explained. “We have a very picky car, a very – let’s say – unstable car in the high speed. And it sometimes it generates mistakes, in this case, accidents.

“Both Charles and I were trying everything we can to put the car on the limit, to put it where the car deserves to be. Which in my opinion this weekend, it’s just behind the Red Bulls.

“In Q3 I didn’t have the best lap in the first run, and Fernando [Alonso] beat us. So yeah, we will make sure that we try to take the car to what it can do.”

Additional reporting by Mandy Curi