Leclerc reveals three of four brakes failed before his Monaco crash

Charles Leclerc’s Monaco Grand Prix ended against the barriers at Antony Noghès corner because three of his four brakes had stopped working, the Ferrari driver confirmed to journalists after the race. Running third at the time of the safety car restart, Leclerc said the failure left him with no realistic way to keep the car on track.

“Out of the four brakes, I had three brakes not working,” Leclerc said. “The front left was working well, the front right was half working, and the two rear brakes were not working at all. And when I say at all, it’s that on data, there’s no deceleration at all. It’s like the calipers were not even in the car.”

The Monegasque immediately radioed Ferrari to make clear he was not responsible for the incident. “I’m not even going to take the blame,” he told the team — a position backed up by the data reviewed by team principal Fred Vasseur and deputy team principal Jerome d’Ambrosio.

Leclerc said the problem emerged during the safety car period and worsened rapidly, leaving him with no viable option. “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. 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 was just no solution.”

Describing the experience as “a nightmare”, Leclerc acknowledged that brake wear around Monaco’s tight street circuit has historically been a challenge, though Ferrari has not yet pinpointed the exact cause of Sunday’s failure. “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.”

Asked whether he had encountered anything similar before, Leclerc was unequivocal: “No, not to that extent. Surely sometimes it’s a little bit tricky, but there it was just not possible to go around a corner.”

Ferrari says a solution is already available internally. From the next race, Leclerc will adopt the same brake configuration currently used by team-mate Lewis Hamilton. “We have the solution in-house, and I’ll go to the Lewis configuration from next race onward, which hopefully will be a step,” he said.