Leclerc warns Ferrari starts won’t offset Mercedes pace advantage

Charles Leclerc has played down Ferrari’s reputation for lightning starts, warning they won’t be enough to offset Mercedes’ startling pace advantage in Melbourne.

Leclerc will start the season-opening Australian Grand Prix from fourth on the grid, having qualified eight-tenths of a second slower than pole-sitter George Russell, who headed a Mercedes 1-2.

Charles Leclerc warns Ferrari starts may not match Mercedes pace

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Although Ferrari and McLaren shared the spoils on Friday in Melbourne, it was all Mercedes, and notably Russell, on Saturday.

Russell fired a warning shot in FP3 as his late-session qualifying simulation put him 0.616s ahead of Lewis Hamilton. The Ferrari driver was left asking: “Where the hell is that six-tenths?”

By the end of qualifying, Russell’s advantage over everyone but his teammate had grown to 0.785s. That advantage was to Isack Hadjar in third, with Leclerc another 0.024s back.

Monegasque driver Leclerc revealed he was shocked when he looked at Russell’s data after final practice.

“I think yesterday I said half second,” he told PlanetF1.com and other accredited media in Melbourne. “Now it’s eight, so it’s bigger than what I expected, for sure.

“But it was a very significant recap yesterday already. So I was very, very impressed this morning with the FP3 power that they’ve shown, which was just crazy in the last lap for George especially.

“I looked at the data for the first time, and I had to re-upload it because I thought it was there was a problem on the things I was seeing. But apparently not.”

It begs the question, can Ferrari’s flying starts overcome the Mercedes?

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Leclerc doubts it as he believes that if Mercedes optimises its own start, there won’t be much between the two.

“I think there is a wrong expectation about the starts,” he insisted.

“I think our engine is a bit easier to have a good start. But I think that if Mercedes does everything optimised, there won’t be that much of a difference.

“But it surely will be a little bit trickier for them to get in the right window.”

And if Leclerc does get ahead of the opening lap, that doesn’t mean Mercedes won’t fight back.

“There are lots of unknowns,” he said. “I don’t really know how it’s going to go.

“You can easily pass cars on the first lap, you can very easily then get passed by half the grid on the next lap if you go so stupid. So I don’t know if it meant everybody not doing anything or seeing some crazy things, but I guess we’ll wait and see.”

However, it’s not just Mercedes that Ferrari will have to fight on Sunday, there’s also Red Bull and McLaren.

Red Bull’s Hadjar qualified ahead of Leclerc on a day in which Max Verstappen crashed in Q1, while Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris separated the two Ferraris.

Leclerc says he wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t only Mercedes and Ferrari going for the top positions in qualifying.

“I expect it to be the same kind of pace with McLaren and Red Bull. It wasn’t a big surprise,” he said.

“We’ve had some issues during our qualifying, so I think there’s more pace for us. In Q2 we’ve had issues with the deployment of both cars. In Q3 we had to kind of catch up for the Q2 that we had missed and with these cars, every lap you lose is a big disadvantage. So for sure, we weren’t optimised for Q3.”

Additional reporting by Mat Coch

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