With time winding down in the second qualifying session Saturday, Charles Leclerc was on the outside looking in to Q3. He needed to somehow, in wet conditions, post a good enough lap time to advance to Q3.
That lap time never came, and the driver’s frustrations boiled over inside the cockpit of his SF-23:
It marked the second race in a row that Leclerc failed to advance to Q3.
Speaking after qualifying, Leclerc remained frustrated at decisions made during Q2. While the teams, including Ferrari, were struggling to pick the best option in tricky conditions, Leclerc noted that other drivers — such as Alex Albon — were rolling the dice with soft tyres and not the intermediates.
Leclerc asked to make the switch to softs, but the team wanted him to at least post a lap on the intermediates to get a time on the board.
He eventually made the switch, but it came later in the session, after others had posted better times on the soft compound, pushing his time on the intermediates down into the drop zone. He eventually made the switch to the softs, but as you can see in this graph from F1 Tempo, his best lap time remained the one posted on the intermediates, which was not good enough to see him through to Q3:
That left Leclerc in P11. He will start the race in tenth, after a penalty handed down to teammate Carlos Sainz Jr. dropped Sainz to 11th, but that was little consolation after a tough day.
“I’m very frustrated with the qualifying,” said Leclerc. “Not everything is [about the tyres] obviously because some others did exactly the same thing and still went through into Q3 [on intermediate tyres]. But we are just making our lives so much more difficult.”
“We didn’t follow my intuition at that moment and I think that puts us in a very difficult situation after that and we paid the price big time,” Leclerc said further. “So I’m very frustrated and very disappointed with today, and tomorrow I’ll try to make the best race possible in order to come back.”
Issues like this have hampered Ferrari dating back to last season. The team got off to a hot start to begin the 2022 campaign, but failures and strategic mistakes saw the Scuderia fall, as Red Bull pushed past them in the Constructors’ standings.
There was hope that such errors would be a thing of the past, but given their season to date, it seems little has changed.
“What I will say to the team will remain between the team and myself but there’s no secrets,” added Leclerc. “I’ll obviously speak with the team in order to improve, because it’s not the first time that we’re on the wrong side in those conditions.
Leclerc added “I’m very frustrated now and honestly, we need to improve and do a step forward otherwise we’re always going to be disappointed so yeah – we need to improve now.”
Still, there is a chance that Leclerc can salvage things on Sunday. Still, the fact he is in that position yet again is a source of frustration.
“We had really good pace yesterday so hopefully we can have a clean dry race and come back,” said Leclerc.
“But again it’s a difficult Saturday and we are always coming into Sunday with a very difficult thing to do. Starting P11 it’s not going to be easy to come back. I am very frustrated.”
We’ll see if he can turn that frustration into something positive later today.
