"There’s zero performance in this car", Leclerc sums up Ferrari's woeful weekend in Qatar
On the back of a disastrous day for Ferrari at the Lusail International Circuit, Charles Leclerc admitted that the SF25 had "zero performance" despite the team's setup experiments.
Following a tough opening day at the Qatar Grand Prix, Ferrari’s woes continued on Saturday at the Lusail International Circuit.
Charles Leclerc made a poor start in the 19-lap sprint, immediately dropping out of the top-10. That left him in the midst of the midfield fights, and although he got close to Bearman, he could not find a way through.
His team-mate Lewis Hamilton started from the pit lane after opting for some set-up changes. The Briton was unable to make any progress from there.
The Grand Prix qualifying turned out to be another tough session for the Scuderia despite fine-tuning the SF25s in between the sprint and the main qualifying session.
Hamilton exited in Q1 to make that two races in a row where he has dropped out at the first time of asking. Leclerc made the cut into Q3, but he made Q3, but had a massive spin on his first lap in Q3, and had only used tyres for his final push lap.
Commenting on his sprint day, Leclerc added: "We gave it our all. This weekend has been very tough so far. We just don’t have the pace needed in the car on this type of track and were struggling to put in good laps in qualifying.
“Incredibly difficult day, incredibly difficult weekend. I don’t really know what to say. It’s been extremely difficult to drive this car, to keep it on track. I’m trying absolutely everything to extract anything I can from that car, but at the moment this is the only thing that’s possible for now.
Signing off with a word for his expectations for the race, Leclerc added: "We can’t hide our disappointment. I don’t have big expectations for tomorrow, but I’ll try to reset and will do my best as always to bring home a good result for the team.
“It’s frustrating," Leclerc continued. "The best thing I can do is reset for tomorrow and try to come back to the track motivated and try to do something special.
"Am I optimistic for tomorrow? I am not, which is quite rare. Normally I’m a very optimistic person but I have to say that this weekend, there’s zero performance in this car.”
