Charles Leclerc will start the Monaco Grand Prix from fourth after crashing at Tabac corner on his final Q3 lap, a setback that came at the end of a weekend he said was shaped by brake trouble. The Ferrari driver had led FP1 on Friday and was second fastest in FP2, but his qualifying run ended in the barriers instead of with the lap he needed at home.
That is why Leclerc’s name mattered so much in Monaco on Saturday. Track position is everything on these streets, and he had shown enough pace early in the weekend to raise expectations before braking problems began to drag him back. He said the feeling under braking in FP3 was “horrendous” and admitted he did not really know where to brake around the Circuit de Monaco, then was left disappointed after qualifying as Ferrari’s hopes of turning Friday speed into pole slipped away. His result also feeds straight into the search interest around the driver now, with the Monaco weekend carrying extra weight after he had already struggled with brakes in Canada and another piece on Leclerc in Monaco qualifying noted the scrutiny surrounding his session.
The strange part is that the pace was there, at least at first. Leclerc topped FP1 and then went second fastest in FP2, which made the final outcome harder to explain and harder to take. But on Saturday he said the garage had been messy, with quite a lot of issues and more trouble in Q3, and that he had gone into qualifying without the confidence he needed. He also said the mistake was not only about braking, calling it a combination of things, which leaves Ferrari with a problem more complicated than one bad lap.
Leclerc said he was pretty confident the team would have a solution for the next race, but for Monaco that promise comes too late. He has already paid the price for a weekend that never felt settled, and on a circuit where starting position can decide everything, fourth is a long way from where he wanted to be at his home race.
