Melbourne, Australia – Ferrari faced a frustrating Saturday at the Australian Grand Prix as Charles Leclerc qualified fourth on the grid. Despite being beaten by Isack Hadjar, Leclerc believes the result stemmed from suboptimal execution during the session rather than outright Red Bull performance.
However, the significant gap between Ferrari and Mercedes is a major concern for the Monegasque driver, who felt it was simply impossible to compete with George Russell and Kimi Antonelli. The Australian Grand Prix marks the opening race of the 2026 Formula 1 season, with teams eager to establish their position in the championship standings.
“It’s unfortunately what I expected yesterday, I was expecting six tenths, not eight. It’s not great, but You’ll see things we didn’t optimize. Third place should have been ours if we had done everything perfectly,” Leclerc stated.
“But we didn’t and Isack was impressive for his first qualifying with Red Bull, so it’s deserved, congratulations to him, they were better than us today and I hope tomorrow we can develop up for it. Regarding Mercedes, I don’t think there’s much we can do for now, the gap is enormous.”
Leclerc doesn’t anticipate a strong start to provide a significant advantage, believing it won’t be enough to close the gap to Mercedes. “Yes, but as I said before the weekend, as soon as Mercedes gets into the ideal window, it will too work for them,” he explained.
“It’s more complicated for them to get that window, it takes them longer than us, but we’re not going to count on that to win the race. I’m pretty sure they’ll get into the right window and there won’t be a big difference at the start, unfortunately.”
Lewis Hamilton qualified seventh, a slight disappointment as he trailed Hadjar and the McLaren drivers. However, a strong race performance remains possible if he can execute flawlessly.
“Q1 with the medium tires was promising,” the British driver said. “I felt very good, then in Q2, we had engine problems and had to return to the pits. That put a lot of pressure on us to go out and try to find the right formula with a tire we hadn’t tested yet, and it was tricky.”
“Q3 was a disaster for everyone. It was quite random. I think the car had a lot more potential, but we didn’t exploit it fully. If we had, I think we could have finished third today. The car is much better, and the competition is tight between McLaren, Red Bull and us, except with Mercedes.”
Hamilton hopes the performance deficit isn’t linked to the controversial Mercedes compression ratio issue.
“I don’t quite understand. They didn’t demonstrate in testing that they could increase power and now they’ve found a new source. We need to understand what This proves. I hope it’s not related to the compression ratio. I hope it’s simply a matter of raw power and that we need to do better.”
“But if it’s related to compression, I’ll be disappointed that the FIA allowed it, that it’s not in compliance with the regulations. I will urge my team to do the same so that we can gain power.”
When asked about the possibility that Mercedes’ advantage will only last for seven races if it’s linked to the compression ratio, Hamilton responded: “Then the season is over. Well, it’s not over yet, but in seven races, a few months, you lose a lot of points when you’re a second behind the leader in qualifying.”
Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur acknowledged the difficult performance, with Red Bull and McLaren matching the Scuderia’s pace, and Mercedes significantly ahead, compounded by a complex qualifying session.
“Mixed feelings, it was very complicated to manage with red flags, programming errors, incorrect messages, and it was chaotic for us and for everyone,” Vasseur said.
“we didn’t have the potential to go for the Mercedes for now, we could have done better than fourth place, but we can’t go for the Mercedes which are on another planet.”
“On our side, we have to do our best, not make mistakes, have clean sessions. There’s still a long way to go until tomorrow evening because things will still happen, and let’s try to score points in the race.”
Seeing Mercedes with such an advantage isn’t entirely surprising, especially considering Ferrari didn’t optimize its qualifying management, and the eight-tenths gap likely isn’t the true performance difference between the SF-26 and the W17.
“We knew, or rather imagined, that they would have a very big engine advantage and they do, so we’re not surprised. I don’t know if there are eight tenths, I think we didn’t put everything in order and we should have done a better job, but the gap is still considerable.”
The race will be challenging, but the Frenchman believes there’s still much to unlock in terms of understanding, despite a difficult weekend on track: “I don’t know, we have to focus on ourselves to do a good job. The last sessions have been very chaotic for everyone.”
“There are a lot of cars breaking down, coming back, I don’t know if you see it but it’s very chaotic for everyone. So let’s try to have a good race, a good strategy, good energy management, and we’ll sort things out at the end.”
Vasseur downplayed the difficulties encountered with energy management, as the Albert Park circuit is one of the most demanding in that regard, but didn’t apply it as an excuse for the result: “Melbourne is by far the circuit we feared because it’s very complicated in terms of energy.”
“We have a whole sector of 30 seconds where we don’t brake, so we don’t recharge and that poses a problem in terms of deployment. We knew it would be the extreme circuit compared to Bahrain, where every straight is preceded by a big braking point, and where we have time to recharge.”
“It was a leap into the unknown, but it was the same for everyone, it can’t be an excuse or a good reason. We have to try to understand what we could have done better and the list is long, but Mercedes will still be difficult to catch.”
