Leclerc's Abu Dhabi weekend marred by food poisoning, grid penalty

The only highlight of Leclerc's weekend so far was sharing the track with his younger brother Arthur, whom Ferrari ran in FP1 as part of their mandated young driver allocation.

And even that session was under threat as Leclerc revealed he was suffering from food poisoning since Thursday evening while his car was hit with a battery problem, which meant he missed half of FP1.

And while the Monegasque went on to top the timing screens at the end of FP1, McLaren's Lando Norris hit back in FP2 with a strong showing that, combined with Leclerc's grid penalty for taking a new battery, put Ferrari on the back foot in their fight against McLaren for the 2024 Formula 1 constructors' championship.

Looking back on the start of his weekend after Friday's running was done, Leclerc said of his grid penalty: "It makes our weekend more difficult.

"It all started unfortunately last night when I got food poisoned and couldn’t sleep all the night which… I’m so tired, I just want to sleep now.

"It wasn’t so easy, even this morning I didn’t feel like I wanted to drive, but obviously the huge motivation of the day was doing the FP1 with my younger brother.

"This is a dream that [has] come true today for both of us, for all of our family that travelled all the way from Monaco to see that and it was a very emotional moment. I definitely had to put the helmet on very early because I also was emotional.

"And then that’s where everything started to go wrong unfortunately," he lamented, "because as soon as we fired up the car, we saw that there was a problem with the energy store.

"[There were] lots of things going through my head – first, am I going to drive this FP1 with my brother which is a unique opportunity, and obviously also the championship.

"That makes our weekend a lot more difficult, but that doesn’t demotivate me at all. I feel a little bit better tonight already, I’ll have a good night’s sleep and I’ll come back tomorrow with a battery fully recharged.

"Hopefully we’ll have a great day tomorrow and then have an amazing recovery on Sunday," he said.

As for the fight with McLaren who appear to be quite strong this weekend, Leclerc commented: "The McLaren seems to be quicker unfortunately so for now they’ve got the upper hand, but we know that it can swing one way or the other very quickly.

"We’ve got to stay on top of everything, and it won’t be finished until the very end. As we’ve seen unfortunately today on our side, we’ve had a problem but, yeah, I’m not wishing a problem to anybody else, we’ll just focus on ourselves and try to do an amazing recovery on Sunday," Leclerc concluded.

Ferrari are 21 points behind McLaren in the F1 constructors' championship while Leclerc is third in the drivers' standings, only eight points behind Norris, with the runner up position up for grabs.