Saturday in Miami turned into a nightmare for Charles Leclerc, with a reconnaissance lap crash robbing him of the chance to start the sprint event.
Even worse for the Ferrari driver after the car was repaired he had a relatively straightforward qualifying session with clean laps that resulted in a humble P8, benchmarking the pace of the SF-25 this weekend.
Meanwhile team mate Lewis Hamilton just missed the Q3 cut, and will start in 12th.
The double frustration for Ferrari was that Leclerc’s crash was an own goal as the team sent both drivers out for their exploratory laps in soaking conditions on intermediate tyres, when others went for full wets.
Hamilton admitted that he’d also had a moment and was lucky to escape his team mate’s fate.
“I’ve watched it quite a few times,” said Leclerc when I asked him about the crash. “Honestly, I can drive around 100 times, and there’s not as much you can do as a driver.
“I think the mistake was in the first place to be out on inter tyres, with those track conditions and this we need to understand what we’ve done wrong as a team.
“I won’t go too deep into that, but obviously, I think this was the main mistake that then cost us a lot. But yeah, obviously that made the whole day a lot more difficult for the mechanics, for me as well not doing as many laps as others, but I don’t feel like I’ve paid the price of it today.”
Leclerc agreed that P8 was as much as the team could expect given the overall lack of pace.
“We’re just not fast enough,” he said. “We’ve got to analyse. There was something strange on our side. I had to change massively, the car, the tools and everything, in order to have kind of a balance I liked. It was very different. So we’ve got to look into it to understand what happened there.”
Asked if the car wasn’t 100 percent after the rebuild he said: “I don’t want to say that for now. The mechanics have done an incredible job putting everything on and to be honest, we’ve changed few things on the cars as well in terms of setup.
“It’s unclear to me whether the set-up changes had had a much bigger impact than what I thought, or whether there’s something off. But this will look tonight.”
Ferrari’s lack of performance is a real concern for a team that can’t afford to be starting in P8, with much now riding on updates expected for Imola and beyond.
“It is frustrating. But to be honest this weekend I feel like – and that’s probably even more frustrating – is that I feel we are maximising the potential of the car. It’s just that the potential of the car is just not there. When I finish a lap, again today in qualifying, I feel very satisfied with my lap, but it’s only bringing us whatever it is, P8 or something.
“So yeah, we’ve got to look at it. I think a track like this also highlights our weaknesses. There’s a lot of low-speed content. Williams are in front of us, and I consider my lap a good one. It’s pretty easy to understand where we are lacking.
“We are just not fast, and whatever we do with the car, we can run it in different ways, but we just don’t have the downforce that the others have at the moment, especially at low speeds.”
Adam Cooper F1 