- Leclerc qualifies eighth in Montreal, four-tenths behind polesitter Russell.
- Brake and tyre troubles left Leclerc with no grip on the weekend.
- Hamilton outqualifies Leclerc, leaving Monegasque scratching his head.
Charles Leclerc called his Canadian Grand Prix weekend one of the worst of his career after qualifying eighth at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Saturday.
The Ferrari driver, who arrived in Montreal third in the 2026 Drivers’ Championship, ended up four tenths behind polesitter George Russell. He had no answer for why the car felt so wrong.
From the very first lap, nothing clicked
According to Leclerc’s account, the trouble began early in FP1 and never left. The Monagasque driver struggled with brake feel on Friday and could not get his tyres up to temperature on Saturday.
“Honestly, it’s one, if not the worst weekend of my career. Since FP1, I haven’t had one lap where I could feel the car,” he told Formula 1’s broadcast team after qualifying.
Traffic in Q1 and Q2 denied him the clean preparation laps he needed to warm his tyres. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve already demands long warm-up runs, and without those laps, the rubber simply would not switch on.
“It’s been a horrible weekend, I have zero feeling with the car,” Leclerc said.
His teammate Lewis Hamilton had no such problems. Hamilton qualified fifth and looked increasingly comfortable in the SF-26 across every session. The gap between the two drivers in the same garage was hard for Leclerc to explain.
“In the wall or P8”: a brutally honest team radio
As he entered the garage at the end of Q2, Leclerc told race engineer Bryan Bozzi exactly what he expected. “Q3 is either in the wall or P8,” he said over team radio.
He was right on both. He finished eighth after spending most of the lap on the edge of losing the car.
“I just felt like I was going to put it into the wall in every single corner I do just because the tyres were completely out of the window today. The brakes yesterday that were not in the window as well. There was never, at any time, something that was just clicking and everything was right,” he said to F1 TV.
That absence of any anchor point was what made it so difficult. He could not build on one run to improve the next. Each session started from scratch.
The Hamilton contrast leaves Leclerc searching for answers
Leclerc did not shy away from the comparison with Hamilton. He acknowledged that his teammate had managed to get the tyres working in conditions where he could not.
“Surely Lewis managed to do that throughout qualifying, and I didn’t,” he said.
He said he would study what Hamilton did differently in those conditions. But he was candid about how little he understood it. “It’s strange, but it’s the situation I find myself in at the moment, and I’ve got to work on that,” he told reporters in the paddock.
He added that the car simply felt alien beneath him all weekend. “Surely I can do better things, but it just felt very off,” he said. That admission, from a driver of his experience, said everything about how disorienting the weekend had been.
A familiar Canada pattern, and an uncertain race ahead
Leclerc also pointed to something beyond this weekend alone. He said the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve has rarely been kind to him in qualifying, even when the Ferrari has worked well for other drivers.
“I get more the impression that it’s Charles Leclerc and Canada that don’t go together,” he told GPblog and other media.
He did note one curious detail. His race performances in Montreal have tended to be stronger than his qualifying results, which runs counter to the usual pattern. “I feel like my driving style works very well in race conditions, but in qualifying, I’m always in trouble,” he said.
Rain is forecast for Sunday, which makes that observation harder to lean on. Leclerc starts from the fourth row and faces a significant task to protect his third place in the championship.
