His Belgian Grand Prix compromised by an errant tear-off, Charles Leclerc calls for action on discarded visor protectors.

Whilst teammate, Carlos Sainz was defending Ferrari's record on strategy, having fallen even further behind title rival Max Verstappen in Belgium last week, Charles Leclerc took a different approach.

Just two laps into the race, the Monegasque was forced to pit under the safety car after reporting that he could see smoke coming from his front-right wheel.

The Italian team subsequently confirmed that the smoke was down to a tear-off which had found its way into Leclerc's brake duct.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it.

In the final stages of the race, while running fifth, Ferrari opted to pit the Monegasque for fresh rubber in order that he might gain an additional point for the fastest lap.

Unfortunately he was released behind Fernando Alonso and as a result the bid to post the fastest lap was thwarted. Compounding the team's misery was the fact that Leclerc was subsequently penalised for speeding in the pitlane, thus dropping him to sixth.

An investigation revealed that the reason for the youngster exceeding the pitlane speed limit was down to the fact that a sensor had been damaged by that very same tear-off... adding salt to the wound was the fact that said tear-off belonged to title rival Max Verstappen.

"I think maybe moving forward, it will be good that we maybe find a solution to keep the tear-off inside the car," Leclerc told reporters at Zandvoort.

"In this particular situation, I think somebody was losing oil or something. I could not see anything with my visor, and all the drivers in front of me couldn't see anything in their visors," he said of last week's incident. "So it happened that, at the first moment of opportunity, we had to take off the tear-off, and it was on this straight.

"So I found myself with tear-offs flying all over the place and in that case, you cannot do much as a driver. Obviously, I'm not angry at all with Max, and it is obviously not the fault of the drivers, but we might look at something to find a way to keep the tear-offs somewhere in the car."

While there is a rule which states that tear-offs must not be thrown on to the track, muck lke the regulations surrounding jewellery, it has been widely overlooked and unenforced.

Though there was a bid to enforce the rule as recently as 2016, (then) race director, Charlie Whiting admitted he was more concerned at the threat to safety from drivers seeking a safe place to store their tear-offs in the cockpit.

Told of the rule, Leclerc said: "I guess there were reasons this rule was scrapped off, which I'm not aware of these reasons. But maybe there are other solutions."

Check out our Friday gallery from Zandvoort here.

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by ChickenFarmerF1, 02/09/2022 18:37

"@Roli - what about like in Spa where the need to tear off the visor occurs a substantial time before the next intended pit stop? Plus, with 2 second pit stops that's not a lot of time, and I remember an Indy car race quite a long time ago (so, like, the late 90's maybe early 2000's) where a driver removed a visor tear-off in the pits and it wound up getting sucked into his turbo air-intake and wrecked his engine. You'd almost have to have a mechanic tear it off for the driver to prevent problems in the pits from tear-offs being discarded by a driver.

Seems somewhat trivial to make a little pocket in the cockpit they can stuff the tear-off into while driving. Just put it in a fairly static pressure location so they don't get sucked out of that pocket while driving."

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2. Posted by elsiebc, 02/09/2022 15:03

"Ask Vettel what he does with them. I'm sure Mr. Enviro doesn't just throw them."

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3. Posted by KKK, 02/09/2022 8:59

"Why not just force the drivers to take the tear-off in the pits during a tyre stop ?"

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4. Posted by BillH, 02/09/2022 8:44

"How hard can it be for the brains of F1 to come up with some way to stash the tear-offs in the car?"

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Leclerc calls for action on tear-offs

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