Charles Leclerc’s leaky water bottle made for an amusing moment in Australia when his engineer Bryan Bozzi informed him that his water-filled seat “must be the water.”

But in China, it seems that pesky bottle may well have had something to do with the No. 16 Ferrari’s disqualification.

Did a leaky water bottle lead to a Ferrari disqualification?

A decent weekend at the Chinese Grand Prix should have seen Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc scoop up a decent haul of points thanks to a fifth-place Grand Prix finish… but both he and teammate Lewis Hamilton were disqualified shortly after the race.

Interestingly, both drivers were disqualified for different reasons. Hamilton’s No. 44 showed excessive wear to the skid plank — an issue that plagued him just 18 months ago at the 2023 United States Grand Prix when he was racing for Mercedes.

Leclerc, on the other hand, faced disqualification because his Ferrari was found to be underweight.

Each Grand Prix machine must have a minimum weight of 800 kilograms at the conclusion of each race. Leclerc’s No. 16, however, came in just one kilogram underweight — but still enough for a disqualification.

But where did that kilogram go?

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Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal, initially suggested that perhaps Leclerc was penalized for using more tire rubber than his competitors, considering he’d adopted a one-stop strategy to see out the race in Shanghai.

Pirelli took Leclerc’s tires back to its Milan headquarters for a deeper investigation, but they didn’t find any issues; Leclerc’s tires illustrated the same level of degradation as his competitors. Perhaps the car was lighter than expected, but the tires couldn’t be entirely to blame.

But in a new interview with L’Equipe, Vasseur admitted that “The tires are only part of the explanation.”

The real issue?

“We also lost a liter of water with Charles’ drinking [bottle] leaking,” he said. “The loss of weight is always an addition of many small factors.”

One liter of water is roughly equivalent to one kilogram of weight, so any excess loss in the fluid department could easily comprise a significant amount of the missing weight.

If that’s the case, then any other miscalculation could have disastrous consequences; for example, drivers often drive over the dirty parts of the race track on their cool-down lap in order to collect marbles and boost their car’s weight.

Leclerc perhaps could have collected marbles to account for any excess tire degradation caused by the one-stop pit strategy, but he wouldn’t have known he’d need to make up for the weight loss from his water bottle as well.

Should the water bottle theory turn out to be true, that would mark two water bottle malfunctions in two races for Leclerc — signifying that Ferrari has a chronic problem to solve before any other decent performances result in disqualifications.

Read next: Lewis Hamilton makes new Ferrari admission after Chinese GP disqualification