Leclerc fumes after “very poor day” as Ferrari slump to P10 in Austin Sprint quali
Charles Leclerc didn’t bother with a filter in Austin. After qualifying only 10th for the Sprint, the Ferrari driver called Friday “a very poor day” and said the SF-25 is “so far behind now” that he doesn’t expect a magic turnaround overnight.
The tone has hardened over recent weeks and it didn’t soften at Circuit of the Americas. Ferrari’s podium drought has stretched across five straight grands prix, and while the front seems to be converging between McLaren, Red Bull and Mercedes, Leclerc sees his team slipping off the back of that group at precisely the wrong time.
“Honestly, my lap was clean in SQ3. I don’t regret much what I’ve done in my lap,” he said. “Maybe a little bit more mileage this morning on the medium, you can fine-tune the car a little bit better. There might be a tenth in that, a tenth and a half, I don’t know, but it’s not enough. I mean, we are so far behind now.”
The bluntness wasn’t for show. The raw grid made the point for him. Ferrari will line up behind customer outfit Sauber in the Sprint after Nico Hülkenberg delivered a superb P4, and both Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin and Carlos Sainz’s Williams — yes, the same Sainz Ferrari replaced with Lewis Hamilton for 2025 — qualified ahead of the scarlet cars too. When the works team gets beaten by its engine customer, it stings.
Leclerc doesn’t think there’s a silver bullet hiding in the setup sheets between now and lights out.
“I’ll be very surprised if we found something that will make us such a jump. But I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “Unfortunately for now, it just seems like it’s the potential of our car.”
What worried him as much as the deficit was who’s suddenly in the mix.
“Very surprising the teams that are very strong this weekend, apart from obviously the McLaren and the Red Bull, which is expected,” he added. “But you’ve got Nico in front that has done probably an amazing lap, and he’s been consistently fast this weekend. So we just need to understand if they understood something that we didn’t, but today was a very poor day.”
The Monegasque’s tone mirrors his mood in Singapore, where he pointed to a three-team squeeze at the top and Ferrari’s inability to cling onto that lead group. Those remarks, Italian outlets suggested, didn’t land brilliantly inside Maranello. But the lap times in Texas back him up. Even Mercedes had head-scratching to do, Lewis Hamilton admitting P8 for the Sprint was nowhere near expectations.
“That was definitely not the pace we were expecting,” Hamilton said after finishing 0.892s adrift of polesitter Max Verstappen. “It was looking good in practice, and SQ1 was looking pretty decent also. And then, it just started to fall away from us. The car is very, very tough to drive. Yeah, it just fell away from us. I mean, eight-tenths, that’s a mountain to climb.”
For Ferrari, the mountain feels familiar. They came into the weekend sitting third in the Constructors’ standings and chasing Mercedes, and there’s only so far you can climb in a 19-lap Sprint if your baseline pace is off. Leclerc’s comments hinted at a car that isn’t responding to the usual tweaks — a worry on a weekend where the margin between starting in traffic and racing at the front is measured in tenths and confidence through COTA’s bumps and high-speed changes of direction.
The plot twist is who’s thriving. McLaren looked lively out of the box. Red Bull did Red Bull things. But the green and white cars muscling into Ferrari’s airspace tell the rest of the story: the midfield keep finding one-lap gains, and Ferrari’s Fridays no longer look like a foundation for Sunday.
There’s a sliver of optimism baked into Leclerc’s frustration. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said about the chances of a turnaround. He’s leaving room for a surprise. But when a driver as precise as Leclerc calls it a “very poor day,” he usually means it.
If Ferrari can tidy their out-laps, find a fraction more bite on the mediums and keep tire temperatures in the window when it counts, they’ll at least put themselves in position to salvage Sprint points and set up the Grand Prix proper. If not? It’s going to be a long Texas two-step — and a longer debrief at Maranello.
