Leclerc’s blunt Singapore debrief jars with Ferrari as Mercedes seizes P2 momentum
Charles Leclerc didn’t sugarcoat it in Singapore, and Maranello didn’t love what they heard.
After a bruising, brake-hampered Sunday at Marina Bay, the Ferrari driver laid out a stark picture of where the Scuderia sits versus the front of the grid. He reckoned Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes have closed ranks at the top, with Ferrari adrift and light on answers. In Italy, that honesty has landed like a lead balloon with parts of the factory.
Reports from Corriere dello Sport suggest several Ferrari engineers were unimpressed with the severity of Leclerc’s remarks, viewing them as overly uncompromising on both the car and its management. La Gazzetta dello Sport went further, characterising the current mood at Maranello as strained between departments — the kind of language that sets off alarms in a team trying to keep second place in the Constructors’ Championship within reach.
That fight got harder in Singapore. George Russell’s win for Mercedes pushed the Brackley squad into P2 and opened the gap to Ferrari to 27 points. Ferrari, meanwhile, is slogging through a five-race run without a podium. The one positive? Lewis Hamilton’s raw pace has headed back toward Leclerc’s baseline, an important marker for Ferrari’s ceiling. But even Hamilton’s race unraveled late with brake issues and a five-second penalty for repeated track limits, dropping him behind Fernando Alonso.
As for Leclerc’s take, it was blunt and bleak. He said Ferrari didn’t have the race car to take the fight to those ahead, and suggested the competitive order at the front has converged without Ferrari joining that club. “It just feels like we are passengers to the car and we cannot extract much more,” he admitted, adding that what we saw in Singapore is likely the shape of the rest of Ferrari’s 2025.
If that sounds like a recognition of limits, team boss Fred Vasseur isn’t buying the fatalism. The Frenchman pointed to flashes of proper pace at recent events — name-checking Baku and Singapore — and argued the team simply failed to convert what the car had when it mattered. In Singapore they were “struggling like hell” with braking gremlins, Vasseur said, and that “mega frustrating” theme has masked the underlying speed.
Both can be true. Ferrari’s peaks are real — Friday form has often looked lively — but this car remains too easy to knock off balance on Sundays. The heat, traffic and stop-start brutality of Marina Bay always punishes the fussy. Add intermittent braking trouble and you get the sixth and eighth that Ferrari took home, with Leclerc’s afternoon compromised early and Hamilton’s unraveling late.
There’s also a human element to all this. Ferrari is a team that bristles when internal frustrations become external headlines, and Leclerc’s tone after Singapore carried a sharper edge than usual. He’s increasingly forthright about the team’s ceiling this season, and while that candor plays well with fans — and often reflects what we see on track — it can grate inside a pressure cooker like Maranello. The balance between honest assessment and keeping morale intact is delicate when the margins for P2 are this thin.
The clock is also ticking. Everyone’s already building toward 2026’s new rules, but 2025 still matters, and second in the championship is worth more than pride. It’s development budget. It’s leverage. It’s proof that Ferrari can execute across a season and give Hamilton and Leclerc a platform that isn’t so streaky.
What Ferrari needs now isn’t a grand reinvention — that’ll come with the regulation reset — but a stretch of clean, clinical weekends that turn Friday potential into Sunday points. Cut the errors, calm the tyre and brake management, keep both cars in the window. The ingredients are in there; we’ve seen them in flashes. Vasseur’s job is to make sure flashes become a baseline, not a footnote.
Leclerc’s message, meanwhile, is a warning: the others have found a level, and Ferrari can’t wait for 2026 to match it. Singapore was a reminder of how quickly momentum shifts in this midfield-meets-frontfight era. Mercedes smelled opportunity and struck. McLaren’s floor is high. Red Bull’s post-Monza step looks real.
Ferrari’s response will tell us whether Singapore was simply a hot, messy outlier — amplified by braking woes — or a hard reset on expectations for the rest of the year. Either way, the next few rounds will say more than any quote could. If the team turns those early-weekend laps into real results, this flare-up will fade. If not, the volume in Maranello will only go one way.
