The sports director of the Scuderia, Diego Loverno, regrets the miscalculation in the car’s configuration, altered by the potholes and the wind in Austin
“There is nothing we can do. If we could, we would go back at the weekend to lift the car, but we would lose performance,” he points out.
More than three hours after the end of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, the FIA stewards announced the disqualification of Lewis Hamilton (P2) and Charles Leclerc (P6) due to technical irregularities in their cars, specifically in the floor wear plates, which did not pass the technical inspection.
Ferrari sports director Diego Loverno, has given a detailed explanation of the reasons that caused the error in the configuration of Leclerc’s SF-23 and left the Monegasque without the sixth place he had achieved on the track.
Our Sporting Director, Diego Ioverno, explains @charles_leclerc‘s disqualification from the #USGP pic.twitter.com/cZFEvInIuc
— Scuderia Ferrari (@ScuderiaFerrari) October 23, 2023
“It was not a conventional end of the race for us. The stewards’ decision was to disqualify Charles and Lewis’ cars for violating the technical regulations. “What happened? It happened that the technical rules are clear at the end of the race, and there are some procedures that must be respected for the bottom parts of the cars,” Loverno begins by acknowledging.
“These sections are used to protect the car from the bumps in the asphalt, and in the end, in the investigations, our car was under the minimum limit by very little, but enough for the commissioners to consider it illegal,” he points out.
“The regulations do not allow anything (complaint) regarding disqualification in these cases and we wanted to tell you what we believe happened and why. The sprint format is very peculiar, you have very little time to prepare the car, basically a single session, and then you go to the parc fermé, and that means you can’t touch the car anymore. The Austin circuit is very good, but it is extremely bumpy and that is something difficult for the drivers and for the cars. In the past, almost everyone failed in the suspensions or the chassis, we knew it would be complicated, and that is the reason why we left our car after FP1,” continues the Maranello sports director.
“For us, it should have been fine, but the differences were very small, and also because the wind changed direction and became stronger than expected. That caused our car to not be legal at the end of the race, and There’s nothing more to say, there’s nothing we can do. If we could, we would go back in the weekend to lift the car, but we would lose performance, and we always try to optimize it. In the end, we ended up with a podium for Carlos as a side effect. and we have gained some points from Mercedes, which was our rival at this time,” he argues.