The 2025 F1 Australian GP was a rather frustrating one for Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc. The Monegasque and his SF-25 struggled in the perilous weather conditions, which saw multiple drivers spin out, and only managed to end the race in P8.
What went wrong?
Leclerc acknowledged the performance in the 2025 F1 Australian GP as a setback compared to the more promising pace shown in dry conditions of practice when speaking in the print media zone after the race.
“It was definitely a missed opportunity, I mean, especially in those conditions when it’s changing and that you don’t have the pace, it’s there that you’ve got to score the points and we didn’t today. We were not fast enough at the beginning of the race, when the race was kind of boring. Then, once it mattered to make the right choice, we didn’t.”
However, Ferrari and its not optimal strategy were not the only ones at fault down under. In fact, Ferrari driver Leclerc takes responsibility for a mistake of his own, a spin on slicks under the pouring rain at Albert Park on lap 44. He spun out of turn 11 and fell behind Gasly, Albon Hamilton, Stroll, Antonelli, Hülkenberg because of it.
“But the first one to blame is my mistake out of Turn 11 because with this I’ve lost four positions or five positions, I think. From that mistake, then it puts us on the back foot, and if you look three or four positions in front, then we are third or fourth, which I think was what could be done. So yeah, but it’s the way it is.”
It is worth to highlight the fact that Hamilton, who had not made this mistake and had been ahead of his teammate at that, ultimately ended behind Leclerc far away from the podium. The Monegasque driver overtook the Brit on a restart with a nice pass into turn 1.
Gap to the leaders
In such peculiar weather conditions, according to the Ferrari driver there won’t be many takeaways. Nevertheless, an issue appeared already: the lack of race pace compared to the other front runners in wet conditions once again.
“We were definitely very off in terms of pace compared to the McLarens and Max, so we’ll look into it. But yes, for sure, we were struggling today.
“We were pretty similar to the Mercedes in front, but that was it. Then McLaren and Red Bull were so much faster, so there’s a lot of work to be done. Why, especially in those conditions, I don’t know yet, but it’s been a weakness that we’ve had since quite a few years. We’ve been quite up and down whenever it was raining and we’ve got to work on that.”
New ways to tackle a safety issue
A controversial topic was the decision to not issue a red flag after Alonso’s crash while the recovery vehicles were on track. Safety on track has become more and more important as years go by, and especially following the tragic accident which led to the death of Jules Bianchi over ten years ago, with different protocols implemented since then.
This time, a double yellow flag was issued.
“This is a discussion we’ve had quite a few times. I feel like now they are putting a double yellow flag sector, which wasn’t the case before, which is pretty good. We are very slow where the truck is. Yeah, I think it’s a continuous discussion. On that particular scenario, I don’t think it was that bad. But in most of the scenarios, I think we would prefer to see a red flag whenever there’s a truck on track.”
McLaren had a very strong start
The consistency and speed of the McLarens even in the unfavourable conditions struck Leclerc.
“They were incredibly quick today. To be completely honest, I know that they are incredibly quick because I’ve heard they are incredibly quick, but my engineer didn’t even tell me once the lap times of the McLaren.”
The strength of the rival didn’t faze the Ferrari driver too much but rather will prompt him to work even harder in order to catch up with the Woking-based team.
“I think they were too far ahead. So I don’t exactly know whether it’s a second or a second and a half or two. I hope not two, but I’ve heard some numbers that are quite impressive. So we’ll have to… Now I’ll go back and look into it and try to understand where we are losing the most compared to them.”
Vasseur disagrees
Ferrari boss Vasseur on the other hand was adamant in underlining the lack of representativeness of the 2025 Australian GP in terms of gap to the McLarens, as the weather impacted the gaps.
“The conditions today are not representative at all of the picture of the performance. It is more that if you look from what we did Friday morning to Q2 it is much more representative than the pace in race conditions today.”
While acknowledging the presence of a gap to the reigning team champions, the Frenchman denies it being almost two seconds like Leclerc had said.
“Even if you look on the time of Verstappen it was fluctuating plus or minus one second from one lap to the other because of overheating the tyres. The real picture of performance is Friday and Saturday. Even in this case, McLaren is one step ahead.
“The expectation is always to do the best that we can, with the car we have and we keep the motivation. Our target isn’t P1, P3, P12; the target is to do the best job that we can. Today we didn’t do the best job but we will start from scratch in China.
“We have to always keep in mind the last four races, McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and us, we won one each, always with [a] big gap [to the rest],” Vasseur concluded, remarking the fact that there is plenty of time to extract the most from their challenger and move through the incredibly close F1 grid.
