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A few smiles broke out when Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari race engineer responded to him over water in his cockpit during the Australian Grand Prix.
However, ex-F1 racer Christian Danner did not see the funny side of that one, branding it a “disgraceful” way to reply to their driver.
Ferrari ‘water’ response to Charles Leclerc called ‘disgraceful’
The weather turned for the first grand prix Sunday of F1 2025 in Melbourne as cool temperatures, wind and rain all made their mark, with conditions drying up for the race start before a heavy downpour near the end sparked fresh drama.
But amid a tense race where a potential spin awaited at each turn on the very greasy, slippery Albert Park circuit, there was space for a funny exchange between Leclerc and his race engineer Bryan Bozzi.
The conversation went as follows:
Leclerc: “I have the seat full of water.”
Bozzi: “Must be the water.”
Leclerc: “I’ll add that to the words of wisdom.”
However, former F1 driver Danner was not laughing.
“I think it was actually really disgraceful,” he suggested in a Motorsport-Magazin interview, “because the driver says: ‘I’ve got a problem here’ and out there on the track.
It was not easy to keep the car under control and he says: ‘Hey, there’s something, I’ve got a leak here, where could it be coming from?’ The engineer says: ‘It’s probably water’, you idiot!
“I found that completely out of place, especially towards a driver like Leclerc, who isn’t a whiner at all. He’s not someone who constantly complains about something.
“He reported a problem and wanted a solution to where the water could be coming from. An answer would have been: ‘You don’t have a leak, the water bottle is broken’ or whatever was going on.
“I just found that disgraceful.”
And Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur highlighted radio communication as an area which the team must work on.
“It was the first race, the first time that we communicate between the people in the car,” said Vasseur. “We can do a better job.
“I think that this weekend was quite extreme for different reasons, the fact that it is not a permanent track, the fact that the grip is changing a lot, the fact that together with these conditions I think it’s probably the one of the most difficult weekends to manage.
“For sure, it was quite a shock, but it was not the right weekend from us. Next week we’ll have to learn a lot from this weekend, because we made mistakes.
“It was not the issue of Lewis, it was the issue of the team. We need to find the level of communication between the team, the drivers and engineers.”
The Chinese Grand Prix is next up this weekend, that the first of six Sprint weekends in F1 2025.
