Charles Leclerc was left scratching his head after Ferrari’s pace dramatically fell off in the final session of Sprint Qualifying at the Circuit of the Americas, where a shot at the front row slipped through his fingers. Despite a strong start to the United States Grand Prix weekend, Ferrari’s familiar issue with soft tyres resurfaced at the worst possible moment, costing Leclerc a potential challenge to Mercedes’ George Russell and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
The weekend began with high hopes for the Scuderia, as Carlos Sainz led a Ferrari one-two in the solitary practice session. On the medium tyres, Ferrari appeared to have the upper hand, with Leclerc topping SQ1 and Sainz taking SQ2. But when the soft tyres came into play for the final SQ3 session, Ferrari’s pace fell away.
“For some reason with the Softs, Mercedes really gained something that we didn’t quite have in our car,” Leclerc reflected after the session. “On the Mediums, we were looking good, but on the Softs, for some reason, we didn’t have the pace to challenge for P1.”
Leclerc ultimately finished Sprint Qualifying in third place, two-tenths behind Verstappen’s pole lap and 0.214 seconds off Russell, who secured P2. A mistake in the first sector didn’t help Leclerc’s cause, as he admitted the final run was “a little bit scrappy.”
“I didn’t do anything weird, it’s just that the feeling wasn’t great,” Leclerc explained. “But it happens, and with very limited running, it happens even more so.”
Ferrari’s Achilles heel this season has been extracting peak performance from the soft compound tyres, a problem that has surfaced time and again during qualifying sessions. While the team has often fared better during races, the lack of time to fine-tune setups on an F1 Sprint weekend makes predicting race performance a challenge.
Despite the setback, Leclerc remains cautiously optimistic: “Max [Verstappen] is looking very quick for now, so we don’t quite have an idea of who is going to be fast in race pace. For now, quite a lot of question marks, but I hope that we can win that Sprint race at least—that would be a good sign for Sunday.”
With Ferrari’s soft-tyre woes once again making life difficult, Leclerc and the team will need to dig deep if they hope to turn things around in both the Sprint race and the United States GP on Sunday. As it stands, their early weekend promise has been overshadowed by the challenge of maintaining pace when it matters most.
