One of Ferrari’s customer teams is not worried about a major reliability problem that has marred works driver Charles Leclerc’s start to the 2023 season.
On Thursday in Jeddah, although Leclerc says the Maranello team is getting to the bottom of the issue, his teammate Carlos Sainz said Ferrari is heading into round two this weekend feeling “relatively concerned”.
Indeed, Leclerc burned through his full allocation of two ECU units in Bahrain and therefore has a ten-place grid penalty for this weekend’s race.
“It’s not the way you want to start a season with a penalty in race two, and break in the battery, the ECU in the first weekend,” Spaniard Sainz said.
However, Gunther Steiner – boss of the closely Ferrari-aligned American team Haas – does not think the works team’s reliability issues concern him.
“They have a problem, but it has nothing to do with us,” he told Ekstra Bladet newspaper.
“I don’t know exactly what it is, because they don’t tell me, and I don’t ask them either,” Steiner smiled. “But they have told us that we should not worry.
“So no, we won’t change anything.”
(GMM)
