Charles Leclerc plays down Ferrari title hopes as Mercedes pace gap emerges

Charles Leclerc doubts he can repeat Max Verstappen’s 2025 accomplishment of keeping up with a faster car, given the pace advantage Mercedes has.

Mercedes has won the two opening rounds of the F1 2026 championship, with Ferrari its closest rival as Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton have been the only thorn in the side of the Brackley-based squad.

Charles Leclerc doubts Ferrari can match Mercedes pace

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Ferrari’s lightning-fast getaways at the start of both Grands Prix so far have resulted in some back-and-forth overtaking with the Mercedes drivers, particularly in China.

With Hamilton taking the lead at the start, he fell back into the clutches of Leclerc and Mercedes’ George Russell after Kimi Antonelli overtook him, resulting in an extended three-way battle over second place – a battle that Russell eventually won.

Leclerc went on to finish fourth, behind Hamilton, having taken third in Australia.

Last year, McLaren’s clearly faster MCL40 wasn’t enough to stop Max Verstappen from getting involved in the Drivers’ World Championship, but Leclerc said he doubts, at this moment, that it’s possible for him or Hamilton to get in the mix for a championship title against the Mercedes drivers.

“I think it’s a very different situation [from Max’s],” he said, when asked if he could mount a title tilt against the faster cars.

“I think after the first free practice, we will already have an idea of where we stand compared to the Mercedes.

“I don’t see any characteristics that would change drastically what we’ve seen in the first two races. So, at the moment, I will say no, but yeah, let’s wait and see.

“There’s still some very long back straight where we know Mercedes is going to be extremely strong, but it’s also a very twisty track in the first two sectors, so hopefully we can have a big enough advantage to be faster on the overall lap.

“But at the moment, it looks unlikely with the picture that we’ve made ourselves in the first two races.”

While it appears as though Ferrari is capable of keeping pace with Mercedes, particularly in race trim, Leclerc said the closeness of the battle has been exacerbated by Ferrari being able to annoy the Mercedes to stay ahead at the start.

“I don’t think it’s as close as what maybe people think. Obviously, seeing the first few races, we see lots of fighting between the cars, which is actually quite nice,” he said.

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“But, as soon as you are a little bit suboptimal with these cars, you lose a lot of lap time. So our only chance to stay with them is to annoy them in the first few laps, but, as soon as they get free air, then they’ve shown their real pace in the last race, and I think they’re still these four to five tenths that we’ve seen throughout these first two races, so it’s still a significant advantage.”

With Mercedes able to out-qualify the Ferraris on single-lap pace, which could be down to more efficient energy harvesting and deployment, the changes to qualifying for this weekend aren’t likely to change much, Leclerc believes.

Rather than an energy harvesting limit of 9mJ, this has been reduced to 8mJ for Suzuka as the FIA bids to reduce the excessive amount of energy harvesting carried out during a lap and skew the balance back in favour of more natural driving techniques.

While the reduction in energy focus will result in slightly slower laptimes, the drivers won’t have to engage in as much lift-and-coast or superclipping techniques.

“I don’t think it will be a game-changer,” Leclerc said.

“I think it will be pretty similar, apart from for the driver, where maybe a little bit less lift and coast, which is, I think, a good thing.

“I think for qualifying, there are still some changes that needs to be done to make sure that we can push at the maximum, whatever the limit of the car is, but, at the moment, so far, for the first two races, it was more about managing everything properly in qualifying, rather than the actual flat out push that we were used to in Q3 in the past year.

“So there’s still some fine-tuning to be done on that, but I don’t think that this particular change will be a game-changer for this weekend.”

At the start of the development programme for the season, Leclerc said the fact that Mercedes appears to be out of touch over a race distance isn’t disheartening for him.

“That doesn’t discourage me,” he said.

“We have some things in the pipeline. We’ve got to focus on ourselves, not trying to overdo it, because it’s never good in these situations. And then we’ll see where that brings us.

“I think this championship is all is going to be all about development and upgrades that each team is going to bring.

“For now, we are in an ok-ish place. But, of course, we’re not here to only do podiums… we want to win races, which, at the moment, seems very difficult, because Mercedes is at a very high level, but we are working very hard, and especially the people back at the factory are working extremely hard to bring upgrades as soon as possible.

“I know there are quite a few things coming up soon… whether this is going to make the difference or not, I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure the others are not on vacation either, so it’s going to be tough.”

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