Charles Leclerc explained that he was a passenger in the crash that eliminated both himself and Brendon Hartley from his home Grand Prix in Monaco.
Leclerc had been chasing Hartley for 11th position when he careered into the back of his rival under braking for the Nouvelle Chicane.
Replays during the race suggested that a brake problem had affected Leclerc and he confirmed in the aftermath that a front-left disc failure was behind his inability to stop his Sauber C37.
Stewards summoned Leclerc but cleared him of wrongdoing after accepting that a mechanical failure was behind the collision.
“With Brendon I was basically a passenger, I went on the brake and the bite was not there,” he said.
“The front left disc broke, exploded when I just touched the brakes, I couldn’t do anything, I tried to avoid him as much as I could on the right but I didn’t have possibility to avoid him.
“For four laps I was complaining on the radio the pedal was getting softer and softer but it gave up pretty… I expected there was an issue but even on the data we did not expect it to give up that early.
“We expected to finish the end of the race so we need to check a bit and learn from it and not have the same issue again.”
Leclerc also expressed his angst at getting stuck behind Hartley after the pit stop phase, believing that the Toro Rosso’s driver deliberately slow pace ruined Sauber’s prospects.
“I think Toro Rosso has played a bit of a game, I don’t know if that was mentioned on the radio that it was planned or whatever, Brendon was clearly slowing down,” he said.
“At one point of the race we were like 2.8 seconds slower than the laps we were doing at the end of the race and he did not have any special issues.
“It was very difficult to overtake so it was very frustrating to stay behind as before that we had a very good place to score points theoretically.
“If [Nico] Hulkenberg, [Pierre] Gasly and all these guys were pitting they were [going to] fall in behind us so we were in the points.
“It’s very frustrating to be stuck behind and not be able to overtake, it’s part of the race, we know Monaco is like this, it’s just frustrating they seemed to slow down a bit.
“I mean if we were in their positions considering Brendon’s penalty [for speeding in the pits] we probably would have done the same as a team, it’s not blaming anything on Toro Rosso, just frustrating on being the car behind.”
