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.
Charles Leclerc, Scuderia Ferrari
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“We do so much preparation all 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.
“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. 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.”
As he exited the pits, Leclerc was told 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, which 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 replied “maybe P2”.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24
Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images
Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur contended Leclerc’s view of events, telling Sky Italy that he’d lost the tyre temperature on his way out of the pitlane – having been held up by the cars ahead going out slowly.
“I have to discuss with Charles about this, because I think he opened the lap on the right temperature,” Vasseur stated.
“But as nobody wanted to open the lap and to be first on track, we all waited a little bit more in the pit lane, in the garage, and we lost a little bit of temperature on the tyres at this stage.
“But he pushed a little bit more, and he came back to the right target before the start of the lap.”
