Leclerc a ‘passenger’ in Hartley crash after brake failure

Charles Leclerc felt like a “passenger” during his late-race crash with Brendon Hartley in Monaco on Sunday after suffering a brake failure on his Sauber Formula 1 car.

Exiting the tunnel, Leclerc slammed into the back of Hartley’s Toro Rosso, forcing both cars to retire from the race with a handful of laps remaining.

The stewards looked into the incident but took no action after Sauber confirmed Leclerc’s car had suffered a brake failure, leaving him unable to avoid the crash.

“With Brendon I was basically a passenger. I went on the brake and the bite was not there, the brakes would definitely not come, and the front left disc broke and exploded when I just touched the brakes,” Leclerc explained.

“I couldn’t do anything. I tried to avoid him as much as I could on the right, but I didn’t have possibility to avoid him.

“For llike four laps I was complaining on the radio the pedal was getting softer and softer. I expected there was an issue but even on the data we did not expect it to give up that early.

“We expected to finish the end of the race, so we need to check a bit and learn from it, and not have the same issue again.”

Leclerc had been catching Hartley for 11th on-track, but felt the Toro Rosso driver was going deliberately slow to stop him from working his way up into the points.

“I think Toro Rosso has played a bit of a game. I don’t know if that was mentioned on the radio that it was planned or whatever, but Brendon was clearly slowing down,” Leclerc said.

“At one point of the race, we were like 2.8 seconds slower than the laps we were doing at the end of the race, and he did not have any special issues.

“It was very difficult to overtake so it was very frustrating to stay behind as before that we had a very good place to score points theoretically. If Hulkenberg, Gasly and all these guys were pitting they were falling behind us, so we were in the points.

“It was very frustrating to be stuck behind and not be able to overtake. It’s part of the race. We know Monaco is like this. It’s just frustrating they seemed to slow down a bit.”