Racing
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Charles Leclerc will start the Canadian Grand Prix from eighth after calling Montreal “one of the worst, if not the worst, weekends of my career,” with brake feel and tyre temperature problems leaving him without confidence in Ferrari’s SF-26 from the first practice session onward.
The scale of the struggle was clear both in the car and on the timesheet. Leclerc managed only a 1:12.976 in qualifying, about four tenths off George Russell’s pole time, while Lewis Hamilton put the other Ferrari fifth despite making a mistake on his final quick lap.
Leclerc said the lack of connection with the car has been constant. “Since FP1, I haven’t had one lap where I could feel the car,” the Ferrari driver said after qualifying. He added on F1TV: “I just felt like I’m going to put it into the wall in every single corner I do, just because the tyres were completely out of the window today, the brakes yesterday were not in the window as well.”
His frustration had already spilled onto the radio before Q3. After Q2, Leclerc told Ferrari he was “completely off the pace” and predicted he would finish the final segment “either in eighth position or in the wall,” while asking the team for clean air above everything else. He then went out and qualified exactly eighth.
This was not a problem that appeared only in the main qualifying session. After Sprint Qualifying, where he was sixth, Leclerc had already pointed to a lack of feeling on the brakes and said he was entering corners “hoping that I don’t end up going straight.” He said at the time that Ferrari had a good idea of what was going on, but was less certain it had a fix.
The contrast on the other side of the garage only sharpened the story of Ferrari’s weekend. Team principal Frédéric Vasseur said Hamilton has been “very comfortable” in the SF-26 in Canada, while Leclerc “struggled a bit more than Lewis from the beginning of the weekend.” Vasseur said Leclerc first had brake trouble on Friday and then found it difficult on Saturday to get the tyres into the right operating range.
Vasseur said tyre management has become a wider issue because the conditions are colder than last year and the teams are using harder compounds. For Leclerc, that combination has been especially damaging, because even after the brake issue improved, he still could not build enough trust to attack the corners.
That leaves Ferrari heading into Sunday with Leclerc needing a reset more than a recovery. He said the weekend is still not over, but admitted his feeling with the car could hardly be worse. Rain may offer a chance to change the picture, yet Vasseur warned it could just as easily make things harder. He said colder temperatures, harder tyres and possible wet conditions will be “a big challenge for everybody,” with Formula 1 facing its first race in those conditions under the 2026 rules.