Charles Leclerc has delivered a brutally honest assessment of his and Ferrari’s performance during qualifying at Imola.
Suffering a Q2 exit on Ferrari home soil, Charles Leclerc cut a desolated figure in the paddock after qualifying.
Unhappy with the speed of the SF-25 all weekend, Leclerc failed to make progress during Q2, qualifying a lowly 11th.
With the tight, twisting nature of the Imola circuit, overtaking will be difficult for the Monegasque during Sunday’s race. Speaking to media after qualifying, Leclerc admitted he did not have a goal for Sunday given Ferrari’s woes.
“Honestly, I don’t even have a goal anymore. It’s just frustrating. I’m very disappointed with the performance at the moment.I guess the only thing we can say is to be sorry for the fans that have done many, many kilometres to come and see us. “
“And the best performance that we could give was an 11th and 12th place. This hurts, but I hope I can do some miracles tomorrow, to be completely honest for now.“
A worrying downward trend for Charles Leclerc during qualifying at Imola
Charles Leclerc confirmed that the SF-25 is suffering from multiple issues and delivered a blunt assessment of his race chances.
“There’s nothing that gives me hope for tomorrow’s pace, just because I think the potential of the car is not good enough at the moment.
“It has to be a freaking good upgrade if we want for it to be a turning point. Honestly, I hope that we will do a step in the right direction, but the road is a very long one ahead.
When asked to name the issue hindering him and Ferrari, Leclerc said one overall problem dominated, and would impact his ability to move up the order on Sunday.
“Just performance. We can do whatever with the balance, but at the end of the day, just the performance is not good enough. There’s one time.
“The race pace is strong, but on a track like this it’s very difficult to overtake. We knew how crucial qualifying was going to be and we didn’t do the job.
Could a bold strategy be the answer to Ferrari’s Imola woes?
Charles Leclerc shut down suggestions that the team could try a different race strategy to the front runners.
“Not so much. I guess the right strategy is the right strategy for everyone. Whenever you go out of that way, you just hope for a safety car.
“Is it the right thing to do tomorrow? Maybe. But we’ll see how it goes.We’ll do the start and see where we are and take a decision from that moment onward.
The Monegasque also ran through his lap on the C6 tyre, Pirelli’s softest compound to date. He admitted it had a similar feel to the C5, but still struggled.
“Very similar, I think, to the C5 at the end of the day. So it wasn’t a big difference from C5 to C6”.
“We could say that. Which has been a bit of a trend since the beginning of the season, so this is something we need to look at.
“But Q2, for example, I think I did my fastest lap on the scrub tyre.It’s also true that it wasn’t a proper scrub because I only had done one outlap. We’ll have to look into it.
“I think Monaco is showing all the weaknesses of our car. So I think it’s going to be a very tough weekend for us.”
