Ferrari was handed a formal warning by the FIA on Friday at the Monaco Grand Prix after Charles Leclerc’s car impeded Liam Lawson in FP1 at Turn 18, adding another stewards issue to a weekend that was already turning procedural fast.
The warning came after officials reviewed positioning and marshalling system data, video, team radio and in-car footage, then concluded the impeding was unnecessary. Leclerc had been summoned only a day earlier for arriving late to Thursday’s FIA press conference in Monte Carlo, where Ferrari received a suspended fine of €5,000, so this was the second time that weekend he had been called to the stewards.
The detail that mattered was buried in the radio traffic. Ferrari’s pit wall told Leclerc, “Three seconds to Bearman, five seconds to Lawson,” and he appears to have taken that to mean there was a five-second gap between Bearman and Lawson. In fact, there were only two seconds between the Haas car and the Racing Bulls car. The stewards said that misunderstanding was ultimately responsible for the unnecessary impeding.
That left Ferrari with the warning, even as Lawson walked away from a separate pit-lane issue in the same session without a penalty after crossing the red light at the end of the pit lane. The contrast underlined how tightly policed the Monaco weekend was: one team was warned for a communication error that slowed another driver, while the driver on the receiving end of a separate procedural breach escaped sanction.
Ferrari agreed it would revise its communication protocols to reduce the risk of the same mistake happening again, though it did not spell out how those changes would be carried out. For Leclerc, the immediate cost was not a grid hit or a fine, but another appearance before the stewards on a weekend when every timing gap, radio call and pit-lane signal was being checked line by line.
