LAS VEGAS — Charles Leclerc called Ferrari’s Las Vegas Grand Prix qualifying performance «embarrassing» and said it was a showcase of the issues the team has faced in wet conditions since his arrival.
Leclerc could qualify only ninth for Saturday’s race and teammate Lewis Hamilton finished dead last for what appeared to be Ferrari’s last chance to prevent 2025 being a winless season.
The team’s superstar drivers arrived at Sin City this week downplaying recent critical comments from Ferrari president John Elkann, who had said the pair needed to «focus on driving and talk less» and improve their own performances.
Leclerc made his frustration clear on the radio immediately after crossing the line. «My god, embarrassing, f–ing embarrassing. F—ing hell, I don’t get how we can be so off the pace … there’s like zero grip, zero f—ing grip,» he said.
«We are doing something wrong. I have no idea what that is because we’ve turned the car upside down. We’ve had Lewis and obviously Carlos before joined that joined other teams who could tell us the feeling they had with the other cars. It’s just extremely difficult to find the grip with our car. Very, very unpredictable with our car which causes us to do a lot of mistakes. It’s not that we are not trying because as a team we have tried absolutely everything. For some reason we just haven’t found out way yet.»
Hamilton, who like Leclerc has been considered a master of wet conditions in the past, struggled from the beginning as was eliminated from the first session.
«The car was feeling great in FP3 and I honestly thought it was going to go well. Yeah, I was really, really excited. «Thought finally we’d have a good day, but it didn’t.»
