Charles Leclerc left the Canadian Grand Prix calling it the toughest weekend of his Formula 1 career after finishing fourth at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Sunday, 34 seconds behind Lewis Hamilton. The Ferrari driver said he had “zero feeling” with the tyres from the first lap of FP1 to the last lap of the race, and admitted he spent the final 15 laps driving between a second and a second and a half off the pace simply to avoid taking risks.
Leclerc’s result kept him in the hunt, but it felt more like damage limitation than reward. “I don’t take that as a reward, I say that it’s more out of luck than a reward of my hard work and incredible job,” he said, adding that fourth place was “a good result, considering the very bad sensations.” His fastest lap was seven tenths slower than Hamilton’s best, a gap that underlined how far apart the two were over the weekend.
The Ferrari driver’s frustration was sharpened by the contrast with Hamilton, who closed the gap to Leclerc in the early Drivers’ standings to three points and leads him 3-2 in race trim. Leclerc said Hamilton had been “absolutely incredible” and that he had an “amazing feeling with the car,” giving Ferrari a benchmark for what a clean weekend looked like when everything was working. He said that made it easier to analyse the deficit, but it did not make the deficit any smaller.
Leclerc’s blunt assessment matters now because Ferrari are still trying to judge the scale of their fight with Mercedes after the Montreal weekend. He said the team did not pull away much from Mercedes, even with the upgrades brought by the Silver Arrows, and added that the gap was not as large as it might have looked. He also said he did not know how much Kimi Antonelli had been pushing, but believed Ferrari were not too far behind considering the package Mercedes had introduced.
There was a tension running through Leclerc’s comments: the result was respectable, but the car was not. He said his job on weekends like this is to maximise the points, and that is exactly what he did, even if the performance never felt secure. The picture from Canada is not one of Ferrari suddenly finding pace, but of a driver salvaging a crucial finish while Hamilton made the more convincing statement, both in lap time and in the standings.
Leclerc also said the weekend was made harder by the conditions, with the message on the grid matching the feeling in the car: he was dressed for winter rather than early summer in Canada. For Ferrari, the immediate question is not whether Leclerc can rebound — it is whether the team can give him a car that does not leave him fighting the tyres from the first lap to the last.
