Leclerc baffled by Ferrari’s Hungary form swing

Charles Leclerc said Ferrari must understand why the SF-26 was only good enough for fourth and fifth at the Hungarian Grand Prix after arriving at a circuit it expected to suit the car.

The Ferrari driver described Hungary as the latest example of a three-race pattern that does not match the team’s pre-weekend expectations. Ferrari had expected to struggle at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps, yet Leclerc won in Britain and finished second in Belgium. At the Hungaroring, where Ferrari believed it should be highly competitive, Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton came away off the podium.

“It’s a disappointing weekend, and I think the thing that is standing out for me after the last three races is that out of the last three races, there were two races where we were expecting to struggle, and we finished first and second. And in the race where we expected to do well, we finished fourth and fifth,” Leclerc told reporters after the race.

He said the problem is not limited to one car or one side of the garage. “So there’s clearly a tendency, and it’s not that one car is doing well because he’s doing exceptionally in the car; both cars seem to have that tendency, of being good on the weekend where we expected to struggle and struggling on the weekend where we thought we would be good,” he said, adding that it is something Ferrari needs to investigate.

That result was especially hard for Ferrari to accept because Budapest had looked promising from the start of the weekend. Ferrari ran first and second in Friday practice, and team principal Frédéric Vasseur said afterward, “When you are first and second on Friday, you expect much more.” Leclerc also said Ferrari had gone into the weekend expecting a strong Mercedes and a strong McLaren, but still believed the Hungaroring would fit its own package better than it ultimately did.

Leclerc said Ferrari also hurt itself at the start, on a circuit where track position matters heavily. He lost ground off the line after qualifying near the front and admitted that “with a good start, things could have looked very different, because on a track like that, there’s not much overtaking.” Even so, he did not put the result down only to launch execution.

“We paid the price for our starts, even though we were never really strong at any point during the race,” Leclerc said. He added that Ferrari had too many “ups and downs” through the grand prix, with the first stint “not bad” and the final stint on the soft tire good, but not enough consistency across the race. He also said Hamilton struggled in some phases while he found other phases harder himself, calling the overall picture “a little bit strange” because there seems to be “absolutely no correlation.”

For Ferrari, that makes the bigger issue less about one disappointing Sunday in Budapest and more about a car whose real performance is still not lining up with what the team expects before the weekend begins.