Charles Leclerc was left fuming after Saturday’s disastrous qualifying session in Singapore, in which his Ferrari team bungled his tyre warm-up in the crucial final moments of Q3.
Leclerc's confidence in his SF-24 had been restored following a challenging FP3 session in which the Monegasque had struggled.
As temperatures dropped during qualifying, Ferrari seemed to find their groove, and Leclerc was hopeful of a strong performance.
But his final flyer, which occurred after a lengthy red flag period triggered by a heavy crash suffered by his teammate Carlos Sainz, was only good for P9 on Sunday’s grid.
Leclerc attributed his lack of pace to cold front tyres, which deprived him of the early grip he needed to challenge polesitter Lando Norris and runner-up Max Verstappen.
"Q1, Q2 was going well, I was kind of hopeful again after FP3 that went wrong," Leclerc revealed. "But then I got out of the box in Q3 and the front tyres were way cooler.”
Somewhere along the line, the pre-run heating process had failed. Leclerc’s race engineer, Bryan Bozzi, informed him that the front tyres were "slightly on the low side," leading the Ferrari driver to push harder on his out lap in an attempt to build up the necessary heat.
But despite his best efforts, it was too little, too late.
"We do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali, where we know it's as important as Monaco, and we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres. And that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place,” a clearly unhappy Leclerc explained.
"We don't know the exact issue yet, but the fact is we started the lap with two cold front tyres, locked up into Turn 1 and that was it. I never really had the front grip I wanted.
"[Even after FP3] we were expecting to have a strong quali, which in Q1 and Q2 did confirm that we were on the pace to do a good thing. And then we threw everything in the bin with the Q3 tyre temperature issue. We've got to investigate that."
Leclerc expressed frustration at the temperature differential during his final run, which he suggested was significantly off-target.
"I'm not going to go into the detail of the numbers, it's not exactly that," he said.
"But obviously we are speaking about, one degree, two degrees to get it right or completely wrong.
"It was more than that. There was nothing to do. I think we were in a good place, we've been competitive, I also think it's a good job we've done.
"But I don't know what happened on my outlap, out of the box with temperatures, because it went all wrong from that moment onward."
When asked what position he could have achieved without the temperature mishap, Leclerc’s response was succinct but telling: “Maybe P2.”
Leclerc will line up in P9 on Sunday's Singapore Grand Prix grid, one spot ahead of Sainz, although significant damage to the latter's car might result in a pitlane start for the Spaniard.
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