Although it was Max Verstappen who ultimately claimed pole position in Bahrain, Charles Leclerc’s impressive qualifying form suggests Ferrari have made significant progress in their quest to close the gap to Red Bull.
Leclerc’s teammate, Carlos Sainz, was the early pace-setter in the opening stages of qualifying, going fastest in Q1. Confident about advancing, Sainz remained in the garage while the team opted to bring Leclerc out for a late run on a new set of softs. Leclerc questioned the decision over team radio as he was told that they intend to check track evolution.
He was ultimately instructed to abandon his final run, but the decision to head out had already put wear on that set of tyres. Leclerc improved in Q2 with an impressive lap that saw him shoot to the top of the timesheet. Following the abandoned Q1 run, he was left with a used set of softs for the final stage of the session, which he felt compromised his performance.
Leclerc’s best time was enough to secure P2, but left him 0.228 adrift of Verstappen—and clearly disappointed. If he’d been able to replicate his fastest time of 1:29.165 in Q3, he would have pipped Verstappen to pole.
“The car felt good,” Leclerc said afterwards. “The last lap wasn’t… I mean, it wasn’t the best lap I’ve done. I think the best lap was in Q2, where I put everything I wanted in that lap.
“In Q3 I didn’t really find the grip straight away out of the box, which was a bit strange, so we’ll look at that.
“Having a scrubbed set also at the beginning of Q3 I think put us a little bit on the back foot because the track is evolving and it’s a bit more difficult to read how much front flap you need to put for that last run, and there I think we lost a little bit of the rhythm.”
Leclerc admitted he wasn’t pleased with the decision to run the new set in Q1, but said that he could understand the thought process behind it.
“I’m not really happy about it. It’s something we will discuss with the team.
“I thought there was quite a lot of margin, but obviously [with this] being the first qualifying of the year the team didn’t want to risk it, so we had to run again with another new soft which, again, put us a little bit on the back foot for the rest of qualifying.”
“I mean, ‘if’… we could have done lots of things, but at the end we are P2 and three tenths off,” Leclerc said about the gap between him and Verstappen.
“I think it’s closer than what it looks on the timesheets, but this is a good thing. We were expecting Red Bull to have a bit more margin than what there was today. So we are a bit closer than what we thought, but the biggest question mark is obviously tomorrow in the race—and I’m pretty sure they have a bit more margin than what we’ve seen today.
“I think it’s pretty in line with what we expected. If anything, it’s a bit better than what we expected. Because again, today there’s three tenths in Q3, but I think we could have, realistically in the car, I think we could have gone closer to Max. So a bit more, a bit better than what we expected.
“But again, let’s wait and see.”
Leclerc conceded that he found himself losing most of his time in sector one, where the Red Bull seemed superior.
“We’ve been struggling all weekend and we cannot really find the answer to it,” he said. “But hopefully it will be different for the race run tomorrow.
“Probably it’s due to tyre preparation, as we’ve seen slight differences along the field and that might play a role into it. But yeah, we’ve tried and we are just struggling quite a bit in Turn 1, 2, 3.”
Despite the disappointment, Leclerc confirmed that the SF-24 offers a “much better” feeling on used tyres compared to its predecessor.
“The feeling is much better compared to last year. Last year whenever we had used tyres the car would become very, very difficult to drive; the balance would be completely out of place compared to the short runs.
“This year we are a bit more… We are in the right window now in the long runs, so it feels quite a lot better. It helps us to be more consistent.
“However, for the competitiveness…we’ll see tomorrow.”
