Palmer: 'If I were Charles, my frustrations would be brewing'

Four poles in a row, zero wins. Indeed, also in Baku Charles Leclerc saw his Ferrari engine go up in smoke. The gap on championship leader Max Verstappen has now grown to 34 points. The problems at Ferrari are therefore starting to have unpleasant consequences for Leclerc.

Accept

After the race in Baku, Leclerc looked devastated. Again a DNF, after earlier in Barcelona. Then, in his Monaco, he also failed to take victory after two strategic blunders by his team. "If I were him, my frustration would be beginning to brew,"  says Jolyon Palmer on the Formula 1 website. "As a driver there’s nothing you can do but swallow reliability woes up and move on."

From his own experience, Palmer knows how depressing a failure due to a mechanical problem is. In his own time as an F1 driver, he had to deal with it too. He explains that you can control so many aspects from your cockpit. If your car lets you down, then you are powerless. Especially for Leclerc - who has a serious chance of winning the world title for the first time and is performing at top level - it must be a heartbreaking experience.

Problems make themselves felt

Palmer points out that the reliability problems of the Ferrari are soon going to make themselves felt even more. So not only were there already the lost points, soon the Monegasque will undoubtedly receive grid penalties when new components have to be put into his power unit. Moreover, due to the budget cap, Ferrari cannot invest unlimited amounts of money in finding solutions to the problems.