Charles Leclerc has revealed that his vision was briefly impaired after the heavy crash that ended his Italian Grand Prix on the second lap — the Monégasque’s first concern as he climbed from his wrecked Ferrari at Monza on Sunday.
Leclerc was running in the top four, battling McLaren’s Oscar Piastri into the Parabolica — the high-speed final corner now named Curva Alboreto — when he lost the rear of his SF-26 and speared into the barriers, bringing out the red flag. He climbed out unaided and was taken to the circuit’s medical centre, where checks found no injuries, but he later disclosed that his right eye had troubled him in the moments after the impact.
‘The right eye was not showing me great vision’
“The neck was OK, it was just the vision a little bit at first,” Leclerc told reporters. “The right eye was not showing me great vision, but now it’s all good, so that’s the thing I was most worried of getting off the car.”
He said the rest was “a bit of pain here and there, which is normal after a crash like this”, and confirmed he expected “quite a few additional checks” that night and the following day to make sure he was fit for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid.
A crash he couldn’t fully explain
Leclerc, a two-time Monza winner in 2019 and 2024, was left sitting on the grass as the tifosi looked on, his home-from-home race over inside two laps. He suggested the car had felt strange under power in the moments before he lost it, without drawing a firm conclusion. “For the crash itself, I went on throttle and 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. We’ll look into it.” He said he had noticed “a bit of a difference in power delivery” between the first and second laps — something Ferrari intends to examine.
Team principal Frédéric Vasseur described the accident as a fine margin. “On the second lap he was side by side with Oscar (Piastri) going into the last corner and went slightly onto the dirty side of the track, which was enough for him to lose the car and hit the barriers,” he said. “It was a big impact, so the most important thing is that Charles is okay.”
Too close with Hamilton
The crash had come moments after a tense opening-lap battle between the two Ferraris. Starting third and fourth, Leclerc and team-mate Lewis Hamilton ran side by side through the first chicane, with Hamilton forced across the gravel and dropping down the order; the seven-time champion suggested over the radio that he had been pushed off. Leclerc conceded the fight had gone too far. “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,” he said. “I was quite a lot on the inside kerb and tried to make the corner, which I didn’t do 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.”
Hamilton, who sits third in the championship, is now 36 points clear of Leclerc after the pair’s contrasting afternoons.
Hamilton salvages sixth as Mercedes win
Hamilton lined up eighth for the restart on medium tyres and recovered to run as high as fourth, before slipping back on a circuit where Ferrari lacked straight-line speed, eventually finishing sixth. The race was won by Kimi Antonelli, leading a Mercedes one-two, on a weekend that also marked 30 years since Michael Schumacher’s first Monza victory for the Scuderia.
‘Turn the page’
Leclerc struck a determined note in Ferrari’s post-race statement. “It’s not the way we wanted our weekend to finish and we have to turn the page and look ahead to Madrid next week,” he said. “A huge thank you to all our tifosi who have supported us here at our home race. We will make sure to come back stronger.”
The season resumes with the Spanish Grand Prix at the new Madrid circuit from 11th to 13th September.