Autobayng News Team
Charles Leclerc was dismayed again by Ferrari’s poor pace in wet weather after qualifying ninth for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
His team mate Lewis Hamilton dropped out in the first round of qualifying as both drivers complained about a lack of grip.
“It’s been like that since I joined the team,” Leclerc admitted after qualifying. “We’ve been struggling massively at finding the grip in those kind of conditions.
“It’s hugely frustrating because it’s probably been my biggest strength in the junior categories.”
Leclerc is in his seventh season as a Ferrari driver. He is convinced they are “doing something wrong” and pointed out neither Hamilton nor his previous team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr have been able to shed light on the problem.
“I have no idea what that is because we’ve turned the car upside-down,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “We’ve had Lewis and obviously Carlos before that also joined from other teams that could tell us the feelings they had with the other cars, but it’s just extremely difficult to find the grip with our car.
“It’s very, very unpredictable as well, which causes us to do a lot of mistakes. It’s not that we’re not trying because with the team we’ve tried absolutely everything but for some reason we haven’t found our way yet.”
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Ferrari have “had some, few, positive surprises sometimes” with the car in wet conditions “but for some reason whenever we thought we had understood something we were proved wrong the session after in the wet.”
Leclerc was forthright in his criticism of the car’s handling at the end of qualifying, telling race engineer Bryan Bozzi its performance was “fucking embarrassing.”
“I don’t get how can we be so off the pace. There’s like zero grip. Zero fucking grip.”
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