{"id":160773,"date":"2025-09-22T10:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/160773\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T10:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:03:09","slug":"charles-leclerc-and-carlos-sainz-left-stranded-after-baku-resulting-in-viral-road-trip-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/160773\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz left stranded after Baku resulting in viral road trip video"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Leclerc<\/a> and Carlos Sainz<\/a> were forced into making a last-minute road trip from “the middle of Italy” back to Monaco in a rental van after their flight to Nice was cancelled.<\/p>\n

After the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where Sainz clinched his first podium with Williams<\/a>, the former team-mates’ flight was diverted to Italy after storms in Nice meant they couldn’t land there. So, they rented a van and decided to turn it into a road trip with Leclerc’s friends Joris Trouche and Antoine Truchet, who are also the Ferrari<\/a> driver’s photographer and videographer.<\/p>\n

“So, after a difficult weekend in Baku, I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but…” Leclerc said as he panned the camera around to show a dark road heading into a tunnel. He then swung the camera around to Sainz, who was driving.<\/p>\n

“We are driving a van!” the Spanish driver exclaimed. “In the middle of Italy,” he said when asked where they were. Why? “We were diverted for a storm, we couldn’t land in Nice, so we landed in the middle of Italy. We rented a van, and now we are on our way to Monaco.<\/p>\n

“A two-hour drive, and we will make it in one hour and a half,” he joked.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Sainz finished the race at the Baku City Circuit in third, his best finish yet with Williams, Leclerc had a more difficult race after a crash in qualifying put him on the back foot. The Monegasque driver crossed the line to take ninth position and two championship points.<\/p>\n

“It’s the way it is but I’ve got to take responsibility for qualifying,” Leclerc explained to Sky Sports F1 after the race. “I didn’t go our way yesterday because I did a mistake in Q3 and yeah this weekend happens and it’s been a very strong season so far for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Charles <\/p>\n

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari<\/p>\n

Photo by: Jayce Illman \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

“But to this weekend I haven’t been doing a great job and in qualifying I pay the price of the mistake in Q3 and in those conditions when it’s tricky that’s where I should be in front and taking that as an opportunity.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t do that with that this weekend.\u00a0Today we pay the price of that because I was basically stuck in traffic and it was a little bit of rolling the dice which strategy would be best.\u00a0You would only hope that you were on the same strategy as the guys which were faster.<\/p>\n

“I unfortunately was on the same strategy as maybe cars that were struggling a little bit more but Liam was doing a really good job defending, had a really good straightline speed and was just impossible to overtake even though we had more pace.\u00a0So that means that it’s not been a great Sunday for us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were forced into making a last-minute road trip from “the middle of Italy”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,98125,4971,13275,106632,817,102015,826,813,816,1510,85,1511,819],"class_list":["post-160773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-azerbaijan-gp","tag-carlos-sainz","tag-charles-leclerc","tag-charles-leclerc-and-carlos-sainz-left-stranded-after-baku-resulting-in-viral-road-trip-video","tag-f1","tag-f1-azerbaijan-grand-prix-2025","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-nosyndicate","tag-sports","tag-trendingteam","tag-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}