Join now and get your first month for just $1.<\/a><\/p>\nThe Chinese Grand Prix, won by Mercedes rising star Kimi Antonelli, was raced under vastly different conditions to the season-opening race in Australia, revealing further quirks about the 2026 model cars.<\/p>\n
A clip first published by The Race on YouTube, shows how Leclerc initially benefited from making an error during qualifying for the Sprint Race at the Shanghai International Circuit. <\/p>\n
A flustered Leclerc was heard on team radio asking his team what was going on with his car during the third qualifying session for the sprint race.<\/p>\n
F1 analyst John Noble said on the video stream the data from Leclerc\u2019s lap is the clearest picture yet of why the current regulations \u201cdon\u2019t make sense\u201d. <\/p>\n
You can watch Leclerc\u2019s final lap struggle in the video player above.<\/p>\n
Co-host Ed Straw described it as the \u201csmoking gun\u201d.<\/p>\n
Noble explains in the clip that Leclerc lost 15kmh of speed down the back straight in China during his second flying lap compared to his first lap because of an unforeseen power surge that was inadvertently triggered by a small oversteer 30 seconds earlier in the lap. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe finally get, I think, not only a proper picture of how these cars are, but also the complexities, the madness as one team boss described to me, of the rules and how difficult it is to drive, to not only get the best out of these cars, but to understand what\u2019 going on,\u201d Noble said.<\/p>\n
Leclerc improved his final lap time by more than 0.2 seconds in his final run, but was let down by a slow third sector where he suffered energy deployment issues. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a fascinating example because it\u2019s something that confused Charles himself,\u201d Noble said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring this lap in SQ3, Charles had been up in the first section of the lap and the time bled away on the back straight. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe lost the power. He lost deployment. He came on team radio ad said, \u2018What the hell is happening\u2019. He said, \u2018This deployment. My god\u2019. Straight after the session, no answer from him. No answer from the team of what had happened. But you look at the telemetry data and we can see it here, all lap time bleeds away on that back straight. <\/p>\n
![\"Verstappen](\"https:\/\/content.api.news\/v3\/images\/bin\/44c6db20d4f2ca57064a901d36c73344\")
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe peak speed doesn\u2019t go as high. He\u2019s up to 15kmh slower all the way down the back straight. Now our understanding normally is how you harvest going into a corner basically decides how good your deployment is coming out of it. But if we look at the previous section at turns 11, 12 and 13 there\u2019s very little difference there so it doesn\u2019t seem to be an obvious explanation. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to look much further back in the lap to work out what\u2019s happened. Now you can look at that straight between turns 10 and 11 and you can see there\u2019s a lot more speed in that second lap from Leclerc. <\/p>\n
\u201cMuch more power is being deployed. And that doesn\u2019t particularly make sense And the reason now we can see, there is a slight throttle lift coming out of Turn 10. We can see the on board, Charles has a slight oversteer moment as the back steps out. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe lifts off the throttle and this bizarrely, due to quirks in the rules, triggers a power boost randomly. And that power boost burns through more power than he wants and then leaves him without power coming down the back straight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leclerc went on to qualify sixth overall for the sprint race. He qualified fourth for the Grand Prix and went on to finish the main race fourth behind teammate Lewis Hamilton and dominant Mercedes dip George Russell and Antonelli. <\/p>\n
Leclerc and Hamilton jostled for positions throughout the race with, with many suggesting their wheel to wheel battle was the highlight of the race. <\/p>\n
However, leading F1 analyst Peter Windsor said on the F1 Hour, there were no genuine overtakes between the roaring Ferraris, suggesting the battle was fought entirely through power boosts.<\/p>\n
The term \u201csuper-clipping\u201d has become a dirty word in the racing category this year. <\/p>\n
Cars have consistently dropped significant speeds without using a brake, harvesting electricity while at full throttle, typically at the end of straights or in high-speed corners, to recharge the battery.<\/p>\n
Leclerc said after the Australian Grand Prix the pattern \u201cfeels like the mushroom in Mario Kart\u201d. <\/p>\n
The Monagesque racer has taken it a step further ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai where he shared a video of himself pretending to play the popular Nintendo game while sitting in the cockpit of his Ferrari.<\/p>\n
Ferrari will get more data to play with at the Japanese Grand Prix on March 29. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Formula One and the sport\u2019s controversial new technical regulations have been taking fire from all directions in recent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-562048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562048","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=562048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}