Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc Were Disqualified From the China GP, but Why?

Although we're just two races into the Formula One season, the Ferrari team has already dug itself a major hole. Things went from bad to worse for the team at the China Grand Prix, where both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were disqualified following the race.

Following the news that Leclerc and Hamilton were disqualified, many want to know more about why each of them got disqualified. Here's what we know.

Leclerc was disqualified because his car was found to be 1 kilogram underweight. The minimum weight of an F1 car, including driver but not fuel, is 800 kg. After the race, Leclerc's car weighed in at just 800 kg without being drained of fuel, and after the fuel came out, the car was found to be underweight. Leclerc's car did have crash damage from a first lap collision with Hamilton, but Ferrari was allowed to replace the damaged part, and the car was still underweight.

As a result, Leclerc was disqualified. There aren't many rules more black and white than those governing weight restrictions in Formula 1. The cars must all weigh at least a certain amount in order to make the competition fair, and those that weigh less could easily be seen to have an unfair advantage. Ferrari attributed Leclerc's underweight vehicle to high wear on his tires, which was the result of his strategy to stop only a single time.

"Charles was on a one-stop strategy today and this meant his tire wear was very high, causing the car to be underweight," Ferrari explained in a statement.

Hamilton, meanwhile, was disqualified because of excessive plank wear that came from running the car too close to the ground. The plank is a piece of wood affixed to the bottom of the car that is designed to stop the cars from being set up to run too low.

Low setups can be advantageous to drivers, but can also lead to dangerous conditions, which is why the plank exists. The plank wears as it scrapes along the surface of the raceway. If it falls below 9 millimeters in thickness at any of four measured points, the car is set up too low and will be disqualified. Hamilton's plank was found to be .4 mm too thin on the left side, and .5 mm too low on the left and in the center.

Ferrari said that it "misjudged the consumption [of the plank] by a small margin," and acknowledged that the mistake was a genuine error.

The team also said that neither racer was doing anything to try to gain an unfair advantage, and even added that the marginal benefits of each of these irregularities would have been quite small.

"There was no intention to gain any advantage" the team said. In a sport like Formula 1, though, where the victors can often be determined by incredibly small margins, there's a reason that the regulations have to be so strictly enforced.