Charles Leclerc’s Miami Grand Prix has been reclassified from damage-limitation to outright painful after the FIA confirmed a post-race drive-through penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage.
Because the sanction was applied after the chequered flag, it converts to a 20-second time penalty. Leclerc, who’d looked every bit a front-runner earlier in the afternoon, had initially been classified sixth. That’s now eighth once the 20 seconds are added.
The whole mess stems from the race’s final lap, when Leclerc spun at Turn 3 and made contact with the wall. It didn’t end in the sort of terminal shunt you’d expect from that moment, but it did leave the Ferrari compromised. Leclerc managed to drag the SF-26 to the finish, yet it was a visibly wounded run home: George Russell and Max Verstappen both picked him off as he nursed the car through the remaining corners.
In the stewards’ view, the bigger issue wasn’t simply that he continued, but how he got to the flag.
“The stewards heard from the driver of Car 16 (Charles Leclerc), team representative and reviewed positioning/marshalling system data, video, team radio and in-car video evidence,” the verdict read.
“Car 16 spun on the last lap at Turn 3 and hit the wall but continued on track. The driver informed us that the car appeared fine save that the car would not negotiate the right hand corners properly.
“Given this problem, he was forced to cut chicanes on the way to the chequered flag.”
That’s the crux: Leclerc’s explanation was that the Ferrari wouldn’t rotate properly through right-handers after the contact, leaving him little choice but to straighten the car and take to the run-off in places. But the FIA didn’t accept that as a justification.
“We determined that the fact that he had to cut the chicanes (i.e. to leave the track) meant that he gained a lasting advantage by leaving the track in that manner,” the stewards continued.
“The fact that he had a mechanical issue of some sort did not amount to a justifiable reason.
“We accordingly impose a drive-through penalty on Car 16, given the number of times the car left the track and gained an advantage.”
The language is telling. This wasn’t framed as a single, isolated off-track moment under duress; it was “multiple instances” and, in the stewards’ assessment, a “lasting advantage” created by repeatedly not taking the track as intended. In other words, even if the Ferrari was awkward, the regulations don’t give you a free pass to redraw the circuit to suit the car you’ve got left.
There was also a separate thread running through the incident: whether Leclerc should have been penalised for continuing at all, given the damage and the way the car was behaving.
“We also considered whether there was an additional breach in continuing to drive a car with an obvious and discernible mechanical issue,” the stewards added.
“We determined that there was no evidence of there being an obvious of discernible mechanical issue. We therefore took no further action in relation to that potential infringement.”
So Leclerc escapes the “unsafe car” angle, but not the sporting one — and the sting is that the penalty lands after Ferrari had already taken the chequered flag thinking it had salvaged something respectable.
For Leclerc personally, it’s the kind of points swing that doesn’t just hurt on paper; it’s the sort of post-race gut punch that lingers because the driving was already hard enough. He’d been in the mix for a big result before Miami’s final lap turned into survival mode, and now even that survival comes with a bill attached.
