Lewis Hamilton put Ferrari on top of Monaco on Friday, beating Charles Leclerc by 0.111 seconds in second practice after the team had also locked out the top two places in the opening session. Ferrari’s pace gave the championship’s tightest weekend its first clear marker: the team looks quick enough to set the agenda before F1 qualifying begins.
That matters more here than at almost any other circuit. Monaco rewards one clean lap and punishes mistakes, so Friday speed is useful only if it survives the pressure of qualifying. Hamilton, who has won three F1 races in Monaco, finished fastest in the second session while Leclerc had led him by more than 0.2 seconds earlier in the day, leaving Ferrari with a one-two in both practice runs and the kind of result teams usually want to protect, not explain.
Leclerc did not sound like a driver certain he had found the limit. He said he had been dealing with brake problems for two weekends and lost confidence in practice two, which left him making more errors than he wanted. He also said Ferrari were ahead on Friday but still expected Red Bull and Mercedes to be close once qualifying came around. Max Verstappen was third fastest in both sessions, George Russell finished the day fourth and McLaren appeared to be struggling.
The combination is what makes Friday in Monaco hard to read. Ferrari had the headline times, but Leclerc said Red Bull and Verstappen were very close in practice two and predicted Mercedes would be near as well once everything came together. Red Bull’s head of engineering, Paul Monaghan, also expected a tight qualifying session, while Russell said Mercedes had been exploring different set-up directions across the cars to understand more, felt better in the second session and still judged the team off Ferrari’s pace. Antonelli, meanwhile, said the car felt unpredictable in the middle sector, a reminder that the margin here is not measured in tenths for long.
That is why Ferrari’s Friday dominance does not settle anything. It does, however, set up a sharp question for Saturday: whether Leclerc can turn raw pace into pole position while managing the brake issues he said have been hurting him, or whether the field Ferrari spent Friday ahead of closes the gap when it matters most.
For those tracking the session-by-session picture, the pace swing also makes F1 qualifying feel more open than the first Friday times suggest, much like the setup puzzles teams face on weekends such as the one outlined in Monaco practice exposes tyre warm-up puzzle before pole fight. And for viewers planning ahead, the weekend schedule follows the same packed rhythm seen on major Grand Prix Saturdays, including the kind of timetable explained in Montreal schedule set for Canada Grand Prix weekend.
