- Charles Leclerc briefly lost clear vision in his right eye after a 60G crash at Monza’s Parabolica corner on the second lap of his home team’s biggest race of the year.
- The crash followed a first-lap, wheel-to-wheel battle with teammate Lewis Hamilton that pushed Hamilton into the gravel and left both Ferrari drivers pointing fingers at the team’s handling of the moment.
- Hamilton has now called on Ferrari to change how it manages the pair, saying the team has to look at how it communicates or risk repeating the same result over and over.
The Corner Where Everything Went Wrong Twice
Charles Leclerc’s home Grand Prix lasted less than two laps, and by the time he climbed out of the wreckage at Parabolica, the thing worrying him most was not the shattered Ferrari behind him. It was whether he could see properly out of his own right eye.
Leclerc started third on the grid at Monza, one place ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton, and the two Ferraris went side-by-side into the second corner as the race began. Hamilton was forced wide into the gravel and dropped down the order, coming onto the radio to suggest he had been pushed off by his own teammate. Leclerc’s race lasted barely another lap. He ran off the track at Parabolica and hit the tire barrier in an impact measured at 60G, ending his home Grand Prix in front of a crowd that had come expecting a Ferrari celebration.
“With Lewis it was a way too close into Turn 1, and unfortunately in Turn 2, I don’t know if we had contact or whatsoever,” Leclerc said afterward. “I was quite a lot on the inside curve and tried to make the corner, which I didn’t do it tight enough, and then I obviously only saw in the mirrors what happened, which is never what you want between two cars, between two cars of the same team.”
A Scare That Outlasted the Crash Itself
The impact left Leclerc shaken in a way that had nothing to do with points or positions. “The right eye was not showing me great vision, but now it’s all good,” he said, describing the moment right after the crash. “That’s the thing I was most worried of getting off the car.” He emerged from the tire barrier without serious injury, but the team scheduled additional medical checks as a precaution to make sure he would be fully cleared before the next race weekend in Madrid.
Explaining what caused the crash itself, Leclerc pointed to a mechanical issue rather than a driving error. “For the crash itself, I went on throttle. On the first lap it felt kind of weird, I had to go back off and on throttle,” he said. “On that second lap, I tried to do the same thing but, I don’t know, it just felt a little bit weird, so we’ll look into it.”
Hamilton’s Public Plea for Ferrari to Change
If Leclerc’s crash was the headline, Hamilton’s reaction in the days that followed turned Monza into something bigger than one bad Sunday. The seven-time World Champion salvaged sixth place after his own gravel excursion, but called the result “devastating” and demanded that Ferrari rethink how it manages the battle between its two drivers.
“Look, I don’t race dirty. I’ve always raced clean and fairly and always left space, so I don’t think they should be worried about me,” Hamilton said when asked about the opening-corner incident. “I’ve come into the team and tried to be respectful of space and definitely not put the team in jeopardy. I stand by that, and that’s all I can talk about on my side. You have to speak to Fred about the other side and the decisions that are taken there, but I’ll keep pushing and trying to get more from the team.”
Hamilton did not stop at defending his own driving. He pointed at Ferrari’s leadership directly, calling for a fundamental shift in how the team runs its two-car operation. “Ultimately, it comes from the top,” he said. “It trickles down the decisions, and so it starts with Fred. There’s only so much you can say, so much you can push and shout from the mountain top. We’ve got to look at just how we communicate, because if we continue to travel the same path, we get the same result. And it’s like, we keep getting the same result. We’ve got to change things, because this is not helping us to move forward.”
A Rivalry That Has Been Building All Year
Monza did not create the tension between Hamilton and Leclerc. It amplified something that had been building for months. The pair battled hard in China earlier in the season, and Hamilton was left visibly frustrated over the radio at the Dutch Grand Prix after Leclerc, running a different strategy, held him up in a way that Hamilton believed cost him a shot at the podium. Team principal Fred Vasseur held a lengthy conversation with both drivers after that Zandvoort incident to try to smooth things over before the tension resurfaced at Monza in a much more public and much more damaging way.
Leclerc, for his part, has pushed back against the idea that Ferrari is sitting on the edge of a full-blown civil war between its drivers, even as he admitted the aggression between the two cars at Monza went further than it should have. He wants the story to be about a hard racing incident between two competitors who happen to share a garage, not a fracture inside the team itself. Hamilton’s public comments about communication and procedure make that version of events harder to sustain, and put real pressure on Vasseur to show, not just say, that Ferrari has a plan for managing two drivers who are both racing hard enough to put each other in the gravel.
What Comes Next for Ferrari’s Home Race Hangover
The timing could hardly have been worse. Monza is Ferrari’s home race, the one weekend of the year when the Tifosi arrive expecting a Ferrari on the top step, and instead they watched Kimi Antonelli storm through the field from 19th to steal the win for Mercedes while both Ferraris ended their afternoons early or well outside contention. For a team already fighting to close a gap to the front of the grid, an intra-team collision at the one race where the pressure to deliver is highest could not have landed at a more sensitive moment.
Vasseur has reportedly promised the conversation about “rules of engagement” between his two drivers will happen properly after the next race rather than being rushed this week, giving Ferrari time to think through a fix rather than issue a hasty statement to make the story go away. Whether that fix holds will depend on far more than good intentions. Leclerc and Hamilton are both proven race winners with their own championship ambitions, and neither has shown much appetite for playing a supporting role to the other. Monza showed exactly what happens when that tension goes unmanaged for too long, and Leclerc’s brief scare over his own eyesight was a reminder of just how quickly a paddock rivalry can turn into something far more serious than points and positions.
Sources:
- https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/leclerc-explains-monza-crash-as-he-reacts-to-way-too-close-hamilton-battle.5tBJS6iY8muL6Um6cgcnvS
- https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/weve-got-to-change-things-hamilton-insists-ferrari-have-to-look-at-how-we-communicate-after-italian-gp.312Ngg23bNozPrSmY75RWB
- https://www.planetf1.com/news/charles-leclerc-additional-checks-vision-problems-monza-crash
