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Charles Leclerc conceded Ferrari is facing a difficult Austrian Grand Prix weekend after a disappointing Friday at the Red Bull Ring left the Scuderia searching for answers on both straight-line speed and cornering performance.
The Monegasque missed the opening practice session, beginning his weekend on the back foot, but he was clear that his reduced running was not the core explanation for Ferrari’s lack of competitiveness. “It’s not been an easy Friday I think, but not particularly from me,” Leclerc said. “Yes of course I missed FP1 and that’s never ideal, but you can still recover from a few less laps in FP1.”
Ferrari’s wider pace picture was the real concern. Leclerc admitted the SF-25 was not where it needed to be, with the team now facing a crucial overnight analysis programme before qualifying. “I think just as a team we don’t seem to be very competitive for now, so there’s a lot of work to be done on the car in order to make sure that we get back to a more reasonable place,” he said. “But we’ll analyse and work very hard tonight, and hopefully tomorrow we can do a big step forward.”
Ferrari’s Friday struggles came against a wider Austrian GP practice backdrop in which rivals appeared stronger, including Mercedes’ performance in FP2, as covered in our report on Antonelli setting the pace at the Austrian Grand Prix.
Ferrari arrived in Austria after more encouraging recent showings, including Lewis Hamilton’s Barcelona victory, but Friday at Spielberg suggested the Scuderia has not yet turned that momentum into consistent performance. Leclerc pointed directly to the Red Bull Ring’s straights as a damaging factor.
“As we've said I think yesterday, the straights are quite a lot and we are losing so much time down the straights,” he explained.
That problem was not unexpected. More troubling for Ferrari was the loss of a strength it had usually leaned on to offset that deficit: performance through the corners. Leclerc said the team had been caught out by how little advantage it was finding there.
“I think maybe we are a bit negatively surprised by our performance in the corners at the moment, because in the corners normally we are competitive and we are not that competitive at the moment, so this is the part to fix.”
Leclerc made clear that Ferrari’s overnight priority will be to recover cornering performance, because the straight-line deficit appears far harder to address in the short term. His assessment was blunt: “I don’t think we have a fix though for the straight-line speed, and for that reason I think we’ll struggle this weekend.”
The frustration was not isolated to one side of the garage. Leclerc said neither he nor Hamilton was satisfied with the SF-25 after Friday running. “It’s been a particularly difficult Friday for the team again, so I don’t think either Lewis or me are happy with the car at the moment. But yeah, we’ll work hard and hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.”
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.
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