Charles Leclerc has warned Ferrari not to rest on its laurels as he expects a Mercedes resurgence for the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix.
Ferrari’s Friday pace seemed to come undone during the top 10 shootout at the Hungaroring, on Saturday.
After having topped both, FP1 and FP2, it was Lando Norris who claimed top spot from Ferrari during the final Practice session.
Norris carried this form into qualifying, claiming a sensational pole position from Lewis Hamilton, by just 0.012s, as Leclerc posted the third fastest lap of the session, over two-tenths down on the McLaren driver.
Reflecting back on qualifying, Leclerc conceded he had a long debrief ahead with his engineers to “understand” this sudden drop in pace.
“I’d say it slipped away from Q1, to be honest. Getting into the car, the feeling wasn’t great, and then it was just a messy session overall,” he said.
“We had to put, I think, two new sets on in Q2, and then it was just kind of tricky from the beginning.
“Turn 1 and Turn 12 are the question marks I have going out of qualifying, and I’ll have to analyse the data. I’ve been off by maybe two tenths between the two, throughout the whole qualifying, and I didn’t truly find a solution to it.
“So, that was a bit of a shame, but that was purely driving. I’ll look into it and try to understand.”
Looking forward to the race on Sunday, the Monegasque believes its rivals have made “big steps” forwards compared to the Maranello-based team, as he warned Ferrari to not bank on its long-run pace assessment from Practice.
“The long-run pace was actually very, very strong, so that’s good,” he added.
“But again, it’s difficult to take for granted what we’ve seen yesterday, because everybody seems to have done a big step forward from yesterday to today.
“So, I expect it to be much, much tighter tomorrow in the race.”
Charles Leclerc has ‘no doubt’ about Mercedes threat at F1 Hungarian GP
It was a frustrating afternoon for Mercedes with both George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli finishing outside the top three after qualifying.
Russell was only able to post the seventh-fastest lap of Q3, with the team asking him to park up his W17 in the dying embers of the session.
Championship leader Antonelli, on the other hand, is slated to start the race on Sunday from the second-row of the grid, in fourth.
10 rounds into 2026, Mercedes has won eight races already, with the Ferrari duo sharing the other two wins amongst themselves.
Naturally, despite this apparent lack of pace for the German marque, at the Hungaroring, Leclerc is vary of the threat the Brackley-based squad poses.
“Based on today, Lando seems to be very, very strong,” Leclerc said when asked about his favorite heading into the race. “So, I’ll say Lando.”
“But if you look over the course of the season, the Mercedes has always been up there. So I do not doubt that they will be in the fight tomorrow as well.”
With Leclerc’s team-mate Hamilton, and Antonelli, both, summoned to the stewards’ for separate incidents during Q3, the grid for the Hungarian GP is still to be decided and surprises for Sunday are surely in order.
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