Ferrari’s early-season party trick off the line has become one of the first talking points of Formula 1’s new era — and Charles Leclerc is already trying to pour a little cold water on it.
After Melbourne’s season opener offered the first proper stress test of 2026’s regulations, Leclerc has insisted there’s a “wrong expectation” forming around Ferrari’s launch strength, arguing it’s more a function of the field learning the new power unit and energy-management operating windows than some season-long, uncatchable advantage.
“I unfortunately don’t think we’re going to keep that advantage,” Leclerc said ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix sprint weekend. “I think whenever the engines are all run in the optimal window, I don’t think there’s going to be that much difference between cars at the start.”
The backdrop is that Ferrari’s starts in Australia were eye-catching. George Russell’s Mercedes W17 had the single-lap pace, Russell converting pole into victory, and the Silver Arrows initially looked set to control the race with Kimi Antonelli alongside him on the front row. Leclerc lined up behind them with Isack Hadjar also in the mix, while Lewis Hamilton started seventh.
But when the lights went out, Ferrari moved like it had been released from a different set of rules. Leclerc surged through the middle, split the two Mercedes and went down the inside of Russell into Turn 1; Hamilton, meanwhile, carved a different path around the outside. By the end of the opening sequence it was Leclerc, Russell and Hamilton at the front — a reshuffle that owed plenty to those first few metres.
In the paddock, the explanation doing the rounds has centred on Ferrari running a smaller turbo than its rivals, which would make it easier to land in the sweet spot for the start procedure. Leclerc didn’t lean into the specifics, but he did point to what he considers the real separator right now: how quickly and reliably a team can get itself into that optimal launch window, rather than raw, permanent hardware superiority.
“We have an advantage in terms of robustness of our system, where we seem to get into the optimal window a little bit easier compared to others, and especially Mercedes,” he said. “But once Mercedes will know how to put themselves in the optimal window, I don’t think there will be that much difference between the cars.
“And I don’t expect them to take long before knowing how to put themselves in the optimal window. So, yeah, I don’t think that this will be an advantage that lasts the season.”
That’s an important distinction, because it frames Ferrari’s starts less as a gift that can be banked and more as a temporary reward for having the early-season processes cleaner than most — calibration, procedures, driver feel, the whole ecosystem around the new start characteristics. In other words: an edge that can evaporate as quickly as it arrived.
Melbourne, Leclerc suggested, was also the kind of weekend that can distort perceptions. It’s notoriously punishing for energy management, and this year’s opener carried the extra unpredictability of a brand-new regulatory package being pushed to the limit in race conditions for the first time.
“As expected, I think this first race of the season was very eventful,” he said. “We kind of expected it.
“It’s also true that we are starting on probably one of the worst track of the season for energy management, and Australia is a very tough one for that.”
Starts, too, were made harder by what Leclerc felt was an unusually quick lights-out sequence, which he believes contributed to some of the messy getaways further back. Liam Lawson, who started eighth, was effectively stranded on the grid after losing all power — and it created one of the more alarming moments of the race as Franco Colapinto had to react late and dive around the outside of the stricken Racing Bulls.
“If you add to the start that, I think the lights went off the quickest that I’ve been seeing some in Formula One as well, that made everything a lot trickier than it already is,” Leclerc said, before warning against any snap conclusions so early in the season. With China hosting the second round and doing so as a sprint weekend, the paddock has barely had time to breathe, let alone normalise the new parameters.
“I think, before taking a big decision, we need to wait maybe for races where it’s a little bit more in the norm for the rest of the season,” he added. “I think already this weekend should be in a much healthier place for everybody.”
If the start narrative was Ferrari’s, the other big Melbourne debate was about the nature of overtaking under the 2026 energy constraints. Leclerc’s opening stint fight with Russell — eight lead changes in 12 laps — was compelling, but also raised eyebrows. With the battle heavily shaped by harvesting and deployment phases, Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko dismissed it as “passing” rather than racing.
Leclerc doesn’t buy the criticism, and his argument is basically that F1 has always had its little games; the tools have just changed. He pointed back to the DRS-era tactics — the deliberate slow-ins to ensure the right positioning at the detection line — and suggested the current energy chess is simply the modern version, only happening more often.
“No, there’s just an additional way of getting past each other,” he said. “I remember the battle with Max in 2022 in Jeddah, where we were both doing strange things on braking to be behind at the DRS detection… Now, obviously it’s for a completely different topic, and something you do much more regularly.”
The key, Leclerc argued, is that a move isn’t the end of the job anymore. In 2026, you’re not only trying to pass — you’re trying to do it without emptying the battery in a way that leaves you defenceless two corners later.
“You need to think about how you can get past a car with using the least energy possible,” he said. “And so this is a bit of an added complexity.”
He conceded the show won’t always be pretty — “in the back it was not always fun racing, sometimes it was a bit artificial” — but maintained the Russell fight didn’t feel manufactured from the cockpit, save for one moment where Russell “really deployed a lot more”.
What’s interesting is how quickly Leclerc has moved to manage expectations on both fronts. Ferrari’s starts may have made the headlines, and the Leclerc-Russell scrap gave the new rules a dramatic opening act, but his message is consistent: don’t assume what you saw in Melbourne is the final form.
In a season where everyone is still finding the limits — and occasionally finding them the hard way — the smartest teams won’t just be the ones with an early advantage. They’ll be the ones who can stop it becoming a comfort blanket.
