Charles Leclerc has a special relationship with Baku, as his run of four pole positions for Ferrari at the street track attests.
This time around he couldn’t find that magic recipe, and while he was second fastest to team mate Lewis Hamilton on what looked like a promising Friday for the Italian team, he wasn’t entirely happy.
The following day his qualifying session ended with a heavy shunt early in Q3, consigning him to P10 on the grid.
With Hamilton two places behind a weekend that started with a sniff of victory has turned sour for the Maranello camp.
“Obviously frustrated, because it’s a track that I normally enjoy, and where things flow quite naturally,” said Leclerc when I asked him about the session.
“But it’s been the complete opposite the whole weekend, and I’ve just been struggling a lot to find the limits of the car and to find the feeling with the car.
“So I knew going into qualifying that it was a bit of an uphill work, and I’ve changed quite a lot the car going into qualifying, and I felt a lot better. And Q1 and all the laps on the soft felt much better. And then we went on a medium, which we had kept because we thought it was the best tyre.
“And today, with these temperatures, it was just impossible for me to switch them on. And difficult conditions or not, I don’t think that this is the reason. I think we were just lacking a lot of pace on the medium.
“I was probably seven or eight tenths off before the mistake, and I was pushing like crazy. So something felt off there, and we’ll look into it. But yeah, it was difficult.”
Although there were spots of rain in the air much like Oscar Piastri – who crashed a little later – Leclerc didn’t want to blame the conditions, noting that Carlos Sainz did a lap that was ultimately good enough for the front row.
“When you look at Carlos’s lap at that time, when you look at others right around me, I don’t think so. There were some spits of rain, but I don’t think it was actually wetting the track. So I don’t think that this is an excuse or whatsoever.
“I tried to judge the grip I would have, even though it was very difficult to judge because I had very little grip from the beginning of the lap with these tyres again, but misjudged it.”
Leclerc’s disappointment with the medium tyre was intriguing given that Hamilton was frustrated that he hadn’t had a chance to use it when he didn’t get a quick enough lap in on the softs in Q2.
“I had the same point of view as Lewis,” Leclerc noted. “I thought I had an advantage going into quali with the mediums, and then I put them on, and I kind of regretted thinking I had an advantage, because it was extremely tricky.
“So we’ll look at what did change on track in order for it to be so difficult, you look Q2 first run with my medium, I nearly didn’t make it through Q2, I went long quite a few times. It was just extremely digital, the grip, and with a soft I didn’t have quite that feeling.”
If Sunday’s race is anything like qualifying safety cars or even red flags could create strategic opportunities, and even from P10 Leclerc could yet earn a decent result.
“I know that obviously we can still have a great race from where we start,” he said. “And yeah, my target will be to look forward tomorrow, and do a great race. We’ve normally had very good Saturdays and very bad Sundays here, I hope to turn the situation around this weekend.”
Adam Cooper F1 