Charles Leclerc is now certain to incur a grid penalty for using more engine parts than allowed this season, handing a boost to Max Verstappen 's title hopes.
After a strong start to the season, Leclerc is being let down by a lack of reliability from his car. The Monegasque racer won two of the first three races but has not stood on the top step of the podium since, with two DNFs hampering his hopes.
The first came at the Spanish Grand Prix, where an engine failure ended his chances of bringing home a good haul of points. Ferrari later confirmed that the turbocharger and MGU-H used that day had been damaged beyond repair.
Leclerc had already switched to a second power unit of the season before that point, for the Miami Grand Prix. And now he has reached the allowance of three turbochargers per year, following another engine blowout which brought about an early end to his race in Baku.
The final turbocharger which has not yet broken is not going to last for the whole of the rest of the season, with 14 races still to go before the end of the year. That means at least one, but most likely several grid penalties lie in wait for Leclerc, for using extra engine components beyond the permitted allowance.
A fourth turbocharger of the season will incur a 10-place grid penalty the moment it is fitted to the car. If any other engine components are needed at any point during the remainder of the campaign, and they go beyond the allowed total, then they will cost five grid places each.
Ferrari chief Mattia Binotto did not say whether the team would opt to take a penalty in this weekend's Canadian Grand Prix, but it is a possibility. "It is a concern – and even more a concern because I do not have the answer I would like right now as to what was the problem," he said when assessing Ferrari's power unit problems.
"We will need to fit another new engine, it's a fact. It's very early in the season. Sometimes the problems you may have are not short fixes, so I don't know what will be the strategy we need to adopt. Is it shorter mileage or a different type of usage, or a short fix because what happened is a short-fix solution? It is something we will understand in the next days and hopefully we will have a clearer answer by the time we are in Canada."
