Charles Leclerc panicked when a radio message from his engineer briefly led him to think he’d lost his chance to start the United States Grand Prix on the front row.
The Ferrari driver was in a finely-poised battle with Max Verstappen for pole position at the end of Q3. After Leclerc provisionally took pole with a lap of 1’34.723, Verstappen beat his effort by just five-thousandths of a second.Verstappen’s lap time was deleted shortly afterwards for a track limits infringement. But when Leclerc’s race engineer Xavier Marcos Padros initially informed him of the development the Ferrari driver did not realise he had inherited pole position and instead thought his own lap time had been deleted.
“I just had a heart attack because my engineer told me ‘track limits’ and then ‘for Verstappen,'” Leclerc explained. “When I heard ‘track limits’ I punched the steering wheel and my helmet and then I heard ‘for Verstappen’ and then I was ‘okay, that’s better news for us’.
“So that’s why in the moment I just said to Xavi please tell me the name before the ‘track limits’ just so I don’t get too excited.”
Leclerc has claimed his first pole position for a grand prix since the Belgian Grand Prix, during which time his team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr has headed the grid twice. The upgrade Ferrari brought to the Japanese Grand Prix helped Leclerc begin to feel more confident in the car, he said.
“All in all, it’s exactly what I’ve been complaining since the beginning of the season, where we have a car that is very inconsistent,” he explained. “Once we get over oversteer, we lose a lot of overall grip.
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“This upgrade was exactly for that and that helped me to gain a bit more confidence and to set up the car in a way that I prefer and to have a bit of a stronger front, which normally is something that I enjoy. So I just feel more at ease with the car since then.
“But there are still quite a few races left and there’s still quite a lot of work to do. So we need to keep pushing, but we did some steps forward for sure.”
Leclerc’s radio messages after his final lap in Q3
| Speaker | Message |
|---|---|
| Marcos Padros | And Russell will be pushing behind us. Three and a half seconds. Behind him it will be clear. So watch for traffic with Russell, two seconds. |
| Marcos Padros | And mode slow target zero on the dash please. Still all the cars need to finish the lap. |
| Marcos Padros | So Verstappen lap time 34.71. |
| Leclerc | For fuck’s sake. For fuck’s sake. |
| Marcos Padros | And we still have Hamilton and Russell to finish the laps. |
| Marcos Padros | So lap time deleted for Verstappen. |
| Leclerc | For fuck’s sake! Tell me, tell me the name before! |
| Marcos Padros | Verstappen lap time deleted. Verstappen lap time deleted. |
| Leclerc | Yeah, well, I had a heart attack in the meantime. |
| Leclerc | Yeah, okay. |
| Marcos Padros | Okay and P1. |
| Leclerc | Let’s go! Oh, that was a good lap. That was really good lap. Where do I go? Do I go on the grid or in the pit lane. |
| Marcos Padros | Into the pit lane. |
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