Leclerc hopes his crash "won't hurt his weekend"

Having been forced to sit out the majority of the opening two practice at the Canadian Grand Prix, Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc hopes that his incident in FP1 "won't hurt" the rest of his Montreal weekend.

Ferrari endured a difficult opening day at the Canadian Grand Prix. Charles Leclerc looked very competitive in the opening minutes of Free Practice 1, but he locked up and ran across the grass to clip the inside barriers at Turn 3.

As a result of the contact with the walls, his SF-25 suffered heavy damage to its suspension. In addition, the crash also damaged the chassis of Leclerc's car, meaning that he was unable to take part in the second one-hour practice.

Hi team-mate Lewis Hamilton also had a difficult first day. Although the seven-time F1 champion had a fairly quiet day bar a few small moments, he lacked pace both in low-fuel and high-fuel configuration.

Nevertheless, Hamilton racked up a huge amount of laps, gathering the data for the Italian team, winding up in the top 10 after running the medium and soft tyre in the second session.

His heavy shunt in FP1 has left Leclerc with only an hour of practice to prepare for saturday’s qualifying session, but he is hopeful of bouncing back and putting up a fight in the grid decider.

"In FP1, it was a small lockup with big consequences. Most of all, I feel bad for the team, because we couldn’t run for the rest of the first session and all of FP2.

"Other than that, I felt comfortable in the car which was positive, so I don’t think that what happened today should have any impact on the rest of the weekend for us."

“That hurts because that obviously cost us quite a few laps today, but the very positive thing is that I felt very confident with the car. I think we were very competitive at that time, for whatever it’s worth, because it was only the third [push] lap of the day.”

Signing off with a word for his confidence, Leclerc noted: “It doesn’t hurt my confidence, and I’m sure that it won’t hurt my weekend at all. I’m sure I’ll be up to speed in Qualifying. How competitive we will be is another matter, and then we’ll have to see. But I’m sure that personally I’ll be 100%.”