Ferrari ‘threw front row in the bin’ with cold tyres in Singapore Q3 lap

Charles Leclerc felt Ferrari “threw everything in the bin” with its tyre temperatures in the final part of Q3 for the Singapore Grand Prix, and reckoned he lost second on the grid due to insufficient warm-up.

The Monegasque said that his confidence in the SF-24 car was renewed after a bruising FP3 in which Ferrari seemed to be suddenly off the pace, as the cooler temperatures in qualifying played into the Italian team’s hand.

However, Leclerc could only manage a 1m30.119s lap at the end of the crucial Q3 session following a red flag caused by a crash for his team-mate Carlos Sainz.

The deletion of this effort, which would only have been good enough for seventh on the grid, means he will start ninth and ended Ferrari’s run of consecutive pole positions at Marina Bay dating back to 2019.

Leclerc reckoned that the front tyres came out of their blankets too cold ahead of his final Q3 run, which sapped him of the grip needed to challenge polesitter Lando Norris and fellow front-row starter Max Verstappen.

“Q1, Q2 was going well, I was kind of hopeful again after FP3 that went wrong,” Leclerc revealed. “But then I got out of the box in Q3 and the front tyres were way cooler.

“We do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali, where we know it’s as important as Monaco, and we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres. And that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place.

Charles Leclerc, Scuderia Ferrari

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“We don’t know the exact issue yet, but fact is we started the lap with two cold front tyres, locked up into Turn 1 and that was it. I never really had the front grip I wanted.

“[Even after FP3] we were expecting to have a strong quali, which in Q1 and Q2 did confirm that we were on the pace to do a good thing. And then we threw everything in the bin with the Q3 tyre temperature issue. We’ve got to investigate that.”

Leclerc was told as he exited the pits by race engineer Bryan Bozzi that the front tyres were “slightly on the low side”, which prompted him to push a bit harder on his outlap to make up the deficit.

At the start of his flying lap, he ran over the Turn 2 kerb at the start of the lap that ultimately caused his lap to be deleted. He asked why he was “minus 10 on the fronts at the start”. Leclerc did not elaborate if this was the temperature delta being shown on his wheel.

“I’m not going to go into the detail of the numbers, it’s not exactly that,” he said.

“But obviously we are speaking about, one degree, two degrees to get it right or completely wrong.

“It was more than that. There was nothing to do. I think we were in a good place, we’ve been competitive, I also think it’s a good job we’ve done.

“But I don’t know what happened on my outlap, out of the box with temperatures, because it went all wrong from that moment onward.”

When asked what he would have expected without the temperature issues, Leclerc simply contended “maybe P2”.