Leclerc exits Qatar qualifying with head down, hope spent

Charles Leclerc emerged from qualifying in Qatar with a hollow stare and a tone that made clear just how deeply the weekend has worn him down so far.

After a bruising Sprint earlier in the day and a Q3 appearance that offered only momentary respite, the Monegasque wrapped up qualifying in 10th – and with it, any lingering optimism that Ferrari might salvage something meaningful from a relentlessly punishing weekend.

Ferrari’s struggles played out publicly and painfully: a car that refused to respond, experiments that yielded no gains, and a teammate again dumped out in Q1. While Leclerc managed to drag the SF-25 into the final segment of qualifying, the achievement felt hollow. His tone afterward made that clear.

“It was incredibly difficult,” he said flatly. “I mean, the whole weekend has been unbelievably difficult. The car is really, really difficult to drive and, yeah, it’s just frustrating.”

His only glimmer of encouragement came from the opening push lap in Q3, but it evaporated as quickly as it arrived.

“I mean, the second lap in Q3 was a really good one, but that’s only good enough for P10 and that is, once again, very frustrating.”

Risk Without Reward

Even the customary Q3 desperation – the edge-of-control style that sometimes buys Leclerc a miracle lap – did nothing to change his fortunes. A spin underlined the limits of his bravado, limits that even he felt he’d breached.

“I took a stupid amount of risks, like I do on every single corner in Q3 to try and get P8, P9, but it was a little bit too much,” he conceded.

“Then I brought it back for Q3 and for Q3 run two that was just fine and it was a really good lap, but there wasn’t anything more in the car.”

That, ultimately, was the bleak theme of his evening: there wasn’t anything more in the car. And Leclerc wasn’t prepared to pretend otherwise.

No Way Out

In his view, neither he nor Ferrari’s crews could have clawed the SF-25 any further up the order. The answer, he insisted, lies in a machine fundamentally at odds with the demands of Lusail.

“It has to be [that] because we’ve tried different set-ups, we’ve tried different approaches and there’s no way out of this situation,” he said. “The car is just not fast enough.

“It’s not like we have a huge balance problem. Even though at one point the car is going to slide front or rear whenever you push it to the limit, but we just go too far to that limit to try and extract a little bit of performance and that makes it very, very, very difficult to drive the car.

“Just not enough performance and I hope that in Abu Dhabi we can come back to our level, but that wouldn’t change, obviously, the very disappointing season.”

Even the Monegasque’s normally buoyant outlook seemed to crumble as he assessed what Sunday might bring.

“I’m generally a very optimistic person, but I struggle to find any optimism for tomorrow,” he said. “There’s not one lap this weekend that gave me the hope that things can go in the right direction.

“So a good day tomorrow will be to keep the car on track and to try and score a few points. I mean, I don’t want to go into a race thinking about taking a few points and keeping the car on track, so I’ll try to get into the top 10, but realistically and do I really believe in it? I honestly don’t.”

For someone usually fuelled by even the faintest chance of a turnaround, Leclerc’s subdued delivery told its own story.

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