Charles Leclerc said his performance in the final round of qualifying was compromised because he caught Max Verstappen on his first flying lap.
The Ferrari driver qualified second for the Monaco Grand Prix having been fastest throughout all three practice sessions. The McLaren drivers were more competitive in qualifying, and after Leclerc headed Q1 Lando Norris was fastest in Q2.
Leclerc fell to third after their first runs in Q3. He said he lost time passing Verstappen during his lap.
“It was a bit of a tricky Q3,” said the Ferrari driver. “In the first run of Q3, I had Max in the second sector and lost a lot of lap time there.”
He encountered Verstappen in the short acceleration zone between Mirabeau Bas and Portier. Verstappen kept well to the right-hand side of the track and did not obviously appear to delay Leclerc.
After Leclerc passed Verstappen his race engineer Bryan Bozzi took the unusual step of speaking to him during a qualifying lap, saying: “Focus.” Leclerc tersely acknowledged an instruction to let Verstappen by on his cool-down lap, and after his final run in Q3 complained about “This first lap with this shitty traffic.”
“Obviously, when you don’t have that first time in Q3, then you have a little bit less confidence to go flat out on the second run,” said Leclerc after qualifying.
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Norris set a 1’10.464 with his first run in Q3 to Leclerc’s 1’10.606. On their final runs both drivers improved their lap times by more than half a second, and Leclerc missed pole by 0.109 seconds.
Leclerc did not blame Verstappen for his failure to claim his fourth pole position at home. “I don’t think this made the difference at the end of the day,” he said. “I haven’t seen exactly the gaps, but I think it’s bigger than a few hundredths.
“So it is the way it is. I’m obviously disappointed. Being at home and being on top of every free practice session was a good sign.
“But I kind of felt it already in FP3 where I knew that I was putting laps very much on the limit. And when you look at the onboard, you can see drivers that are taking a bit of a step back. So I knew it would be close, but at the end of the day, I didn’t get it this year.”
Ferrari came into the weekend not expecting to challenge for pole position as their car has not performed well in qualifying this year and has tended to be less competitive on circuits with many slow corners, like Monaco. Despite their unexpectedly strong performance, Leclerc said he was still dissatisfied with his result.
“I’m not satisfied because you forget very quickly the expectations that you have going into a weekend when free practice is going so well,” he said. “I think we were wrong with the expectations that we had. At the end of the day, it was a lot more positive than what we initially thought.
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“We still need to understand why, to be completely honest. For me, it’s an unknown. I don’t quite know why we are so fast in slow speed [corners] suddenly, but we’ll analyse that after the weekend. But the disappointment is big.”
He suspects Ferrari have performed better because Monaco does not demand a trade-off in performance between high and low-speed corners.
“The only explanation I can find for now is that on a track like this where there’s only low speed – basically no high-speed corners – in most of the tracks, we had to take compromises in order to not lose too much in high-speed corners. We don’t have to set up the car in a way where we compromise anything here because we just focus on the low-speed.
“When we are on these kinds of tracks, it seems that there’s some performance in the low speed from the car. But we are a little bit stuck at the moment on other tracks, so I don’t think we can apply it to any other tracks other than Monaco, unfortunately.”
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