Charles Leclerc made no attempt to hide his disappointment after Ferrari endured a difficult qualifying session for the 2026 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. Despite the Power Unit development brought through the ADUO programme, the Scuderia struggled to deliver a clean session, with Charles Leclerc eventually qualifying fourth and Lewis Hamilton fifth.
Both Ferrari drivers had already survived a major scare in Q2. Charles Leclerc finished the session ninth and Lewis Hamilton tenth, escaping elimination by only a matter of thousandths before advancing to Q3. The final outcome gave the Monegasque driver a place on the second row, but his reaction afterwards made clear that he believed Ferrari had left performance on the table.
Charles Leclerc frustrated by Ferrari’s Monza qualifying
Charles Leclerc finished ahead of Lewis Hamilton, but the result did little to ease his frustration with a qualifying session that had not been managed perfectly by the Ferrari pit wall. The problems were not limited to one area either, with difficulties emerging at different stages of the session.
The wider picture had already been evident during Ferrari’s tense Monza qualifying session, when both SF-26 cars came dangerously close to being knocked out before recovering sufficiently in Q3. Even then, fourth and fifth represented less than the team had hoped to achieve at its home Grand Prix.
Charles Leclerc points to engine issues and qualifying mistakes
Speaking to Canal+, Charles Leclerc was unequivocal about his feelings after the session.
“I’m very disappointed, honestly,” Charles Leclerc said. “We weren’t up to the task, there were a lot of mistakes and problems during qualifying. First with the engine, then with other things afterwards. When you get to Q3 and you have to find those final hundredths, honestly we couldn’t have challenged Pierre, but we could have done better.”
His comments underline the frustration surrounding a weekend in which Ferrari had arrived at Monza with significant attention focused on Power Unit performance. The team had worked to improve the SF-26 package for its home race, but the qualifying session was ultimately compromised by a combination of problems rather than a single clear weakness.
Ferrari must understand why the problems emerged only in qualifying
Charles Leclerc also stressed that the team itself had to accept responsibility and investigate why so many difficulties appeared during qualifying rather than earlier in the weekend.
“Whatever the case, we can only blame ourselves and we’ll try to understand why we had all these problems only in qualifying, because normally we manage to anticipate this kind of problem in free practice,” Charles Leclerc added.
That will now become one of Ferrari’s main areas of analysis ahead of the Italian Grand Prix. A second-row starting position keeps Charles Leclerc firmly in contention at Monza, but his post-qualifying comments made clear that fourth place did not reflect what he believed the Scuderia could have achieved with a cleaner and better-executed session.
