Charles Leclerc isn’t buying the idea that Ferrari’s going to mug Mercedes off the line in Melbourne — even if plenty in the paddock are already circling Turn 1 as the first proper flashpoint of the new era.
Saturday’s qualifying laid down a pretty blunt marker: Mercedes has turned up to the opening race of 2026 with a pace advantage that looks, at least over one lap, decisive. George Russell’s pole wasn’t just a pole, it was a statement, with nearly eight-tenths separating him from the nearest non-Mercedes car. That “best of the rest” spot went to Red Bull newcomer Isack Hadjar, who split the two silver cars and — crucially for Sunday — starts directly ahead of Leclerc.
Ferrari, meanwhile, looks like a team with a very different selling point right now. Leclerc could only manage fourth, 0.809s adrift, with Lewis Hamilton back in seventh and another tenth in arrears. But the Scuderia’s practice starts across pre-season testing — and again in Melbourne — have been eyebrow-raising enough to spark a familiar kind of grand prix myth-making: if you can’t match them on Saturday, maybe you can unsettle them in the first 200 metres on Sunday.
Jenson Button certainly thinks so. Speaking to Sky Sports, the 2009 world champion painted a picture of chaos off the line and reckoned Ferrari could hit the front immediately.
“The start is going to be exciting,” Button said. “They could be five abreast into Turn One. Looking at testing, [Ferrari] had a big advantage off the line. But it’s not just [about] the start, it’s the pit stops too. I reckon Ferrari, Charles Leclerc will be P1 at the start of the race!”
It’s the kind of call that lands well on a Saturday night in Melbourne: bold, simple, and built around something we’ve all seen with our own eyes — Ferrari consistently nailing the launch in practice. But Leclerc’s response was telling, not because he denied Ferrari’s strength, but because he framed it as a question of “window” rather than outright advantage.
“I think there is a wrong expectation about the starts,” Leclerc said in Melbourne. “I think our engine is a bit easier to have a good start. But I think that if Mercedes does everything optimised, there won’t be that much of a difference.
“But it surely will be a little bit trickier for them to get in the right window.”
That’s the most important part of the whole conversation: not that Ferrari is magically quicker off the line, but that it might be easier to repeat. Under a fresh set of regulations, those repeatable margins matter. If Ferrari can consistently hit the sweet spot while Mercedes occasionally misses it, you don’t need to be faster over a stint to create a race — you just need the opportunity to put the quicker car under pressure, force it to race in dirty air, and drag strategy into play.
The problem for Leclerc is that there’s a Red Bull in the middle of the argument, and Hadjar sounds like a driver who knows exactly where his weekend lives and dies. He was only 0.024s quicker than Leclerc in qualifying, but that sliver is enough to make Ferrari’s route to the front far more complicated. It’s one thing to out-drag a Mercedes from the second row; it’s another to do it while also clearing a car directly ahead that’s got the same ambition.
Hadjar wasn’t shy about the reality check either. Yes, a better start could put him in the fight — but he doesn’t believe Red Bull has the pace to actually win.
“Yeah, take a better start, but then it’s going to be… they’re just too fast at the moment,” Hadjar admitted. “So, I want to keep my position. A second podium could be good.”
He doubled down on the key point: the opening corners are his whole race.
“I think after Turn 1, if we keep our position then we have a good race, I think. But yeah, we simply don’t have the pace to win.”
So that’s the tension heading into Sunday: Mercedes looks like it’s brought the fastest car, Ferrari looks like it’s brought the most reliable launch, and Red Bull has placed a hungry new signing right where he can disrupt both. Russell’s job is obvious — convert, escape, and turn the race into a pace exercise. For Leclerc, it’s more like a street fight: make the start count, find clean air, and hope the race becomes messy enough that raw qualifying speed doesn’t tell the whole story.
Because if Mercedes really is “ahead of the chasing pack”, as Leclerc believes, then Ferrari’s starts aren’t just a party trick — they’re the one lever that can move the order before the lap times settle everything back into place. Melbourne has a habit of producing an early-season narrative, but this year it feels like the narrative might be decided before everyone’s even finished their first upshift.
