Charles Leclerc has openly admitted that despite Ferrari’s efforts to maximize the pace of its 2025 Formula 1 car, the team is still facing serious performance issues, which became painfully evident during the Miami Grand Prix weekend. Leclerc’s best qualifying lap was only enough for eighth place on the grid, 0.550 seconds behind pole-sitter Max Verstappen, while teammate Lewis Hamilton failed to advance beyond Q2 and will start 12th. The disappointing results reflect ongoing challenges Ferrari faces competing against top teams like Red Bull, McLaren, and Mercedes.
The weekend was further hampered by Leclerc’s crash before the sprint race after aquaplaning into the wall due to treacherous wet track conditions, forcing him to miss the Saturday sprint entirely. Even on a dry qualifying track, both Ferrari drivers struggled to extract the necessary speed from their cars. Leclerc expressed frustration, revealing that although he felt his final qualifying lap was solid, the car’s overall lack of raw performance simply prevented better results.
“It is frustrating,” Leclerc admitted.
To be honest, even more frustrating is that this weekend I felt like we are maximising the potential of the car. It’s just that the potential of the car is just not there. Today in qualifying I felt very satisfied with my lap, but it’s only bringing us whatever it is, P8 or something… We are just not fast. Whatever we do with the car – we can run it in different ways, but we just don’t have the downforce that the others have at the moment.
Leclerc’s comments highlight how the 2025 car’s weaknesses are especially exposed on Miami’s demanding 5.41-kilometer circuit, which features a mix of high-speed straights and slower, technical corners. Unlike his podium finish at the fast Jeddah street circuit two weeks prior, Leclerc found Miami’s slower corners magnified Ferrari’s lack of downforce. The fact that both Williams cars qualified ahead of him on this track underscores where Ferrari is losing ground.
I think a track like this also highlights our weaknesses,
Leclerc said.
There are a lot of low-speed corners, and both Williams [cars] are in front of us – and I consider my lap a good one. So, I think it’s pretty easy to understand where we are lacking.
Regarding the crash before the sprint race, Leclerc acknowledged it was a significant error to be on intermediate tires given the standing water on the track.
In the first place the mistake was to be out on inter tyres with those track conditions,
he explained, emphasizing that the team needs to analyze its decisions carefully.
We need to understand what we’ve done wrong as a team, but obviously I think this was the main mistake that then cost us a lot.
The crash made the weekend tougher for both the driver and Ferrari’s mechanics, limiting Leclerc’s on-track running compared to rivals. However, he insists that the incident was not responsible for the team’s slow qualifying pace.
Obviously, that made the whole day a lot more difficult for the mechanics and for me as well, not doing as many laps as others, but I don’t feel like I’ve paid the price of it today. We were just not fast enough.
As Ferrari continues to wrestle with the limitations of its 2025 Formula 1 car, the struggles in Miami signal the urgent need for technical improvements if the team hopes to challenge the front-runners consistently. With the championship underway and rivals pushing ahead, Charles Leclerc and Ferrari face mounting pressure to close the gap or risk falling further behind in the fiercely competitive F1 landscape.
