What's been going wrong for Leclerc in F1's tiny margins qualifying game

“We have to wait and see until we get to other tracks to find out.”

There’s a horribly familiar refrain amongst Formula 1 team bosses and drivers during the initial phase of any season: how they can’t possibly comment on the specifics of their new packages due to the rigidity of restricted pre-season testing had that the first rounds these days are ‘outliers’ and only time will provide the full picture. Max Verstappen uttered the above during pre-season testing in Bahrain.

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Tiresome, predictable – utterly understandable in a world where concealment is very much part of the game.

But now, four races into the 2024 campaign, with the stunning, true test of a racing car that Suzuka poses reached earlier than ever before, the trends of the new season are established.

Even with its shock Melbourne defeat, Red Bull remains dominant. Ferrari has flown higher and Mercedes and McLaren have meandered. Daniel Ricciardo is struggling when he’d been expected to flourish. Lance Stroll is letting Aston Martin down again.

F1 has even progressed so far into its 2024 offering that mini-trends within the main plots can be detected. And here we find two that are intriguingly intertwined.

Small mistakes have cost Leclerc this season

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The first is just how close things are behind Red Bull – where small driver mistakes in qualifying or team errors on car set-up can make a massive difference to grid positions and races that then unfurl into history book results.

The second is how F1’s current qualifying speed king – Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – has surprisingly struggled of late against the clock.

After qualifying three and four places behind his team-mate Carlos Sainz in Melbourne and at Suzuka – places where Sainz shone each time – Leclerc declared, “two races now in a row, I've been struggling to put the tyres in the right window” when it comes to qualifying.

"It’s very frustrating because you finish a lap and you're happy, but actually, you're nowhere" Charles Leclerc

What this meant in F1’s compressed field is that a tiny 0.104s gap at Suzuka resulted in a hefty grid difference between Sainz and Leclerc in qualifying.

“My laps weren't that bad,” Leclerc said of his Suzuka qualifying disappointment.

This was a day before he was sensational on a tricky race one-stopper, evoking memories of the 2020 British GP and his brilliant single-service performance to take fourth at Silverstone at a point where Ferrari was positively awful on tyre preservation.

“The lap I did was actually really good,” Leclerc continued. “But the grip that was available from the tyre was just not there. This is because I did a bad job on the lap before. It’s very frustrating because you finish a lap and you're happy, but actually, you're nowhere.”

Leclerc recovered with a sensational drive to make a one stop strategy work in Japan

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

He added later: “Whether it's in Australia or Japan, race pace has not been a problem. It's my qualifying pace, which is not something that I've been very used to in my career – to be working on my qualifying pace. Because normally it's pretty good on the Saturday.”

Dark art, pseudo-science. What Leclerc is getting at is the complex, but critical, focus each team places on extracting peak grip from the tyres in qualifying at each F1 event. This is what the drivers must do on outlaps – ‘prep laps’ in their collective lexicon – to get the rubber in the required shape to work with the car's aerodynamic packages.

It’s when this doesn’t happen correctly that those nouns above get spouted.

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“You can design a car that is more or less aggressive on tyres – and depending on the circuit layout, the conditions, the energy that you put into the tyres, you can have a different situation,” Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola explains to Autosport.

“It’s also true that this year they know our product quite well – because it was the same as last year [from the tougher construction introduced at Silverstone 2023]. So they can probably fine-tune the preparation of qualifying or the race a little bit.

“But this is making things even more difficult because – forget Max for the moment – if we consider the rest of the drivers, they are very close and any small detail in the preparation of the tyre or the management of the race pace can make a big difference”.

The main focus on prep laps for drivers means working to get the front and rear axles in a tyre temperature balance to deliver the car handling sweetspot they all want. Hot enough for the rubber to be switched on, not overly so to risk the tyres cooking through thermal degradation.

Tyre management is crucial in 2024

Photo by: Pirelli

By reaching this point, it’s easier to keep the tyres in the best shape on what Isola calls the “grip curve of a compound” that “can be flattened as much as possible, but it’s still a curve”.

Historically, Leclerc has been a master of finding the peak of the curve to get the best tyre performance in qualifying.  But his hefty, 'controlled aggression' driving style does leave him open to suddenly traversing the curve and those occasional wild moments and crashes. That’s if he can’t modulate the big rear car movement he interjects with his steering inputs on the brakes in time.

Another tyre prep art concerns what Pirelli terms the tyre “footprint”, per Isola, that the Italian says is “another technical element that we should consider” in this assessment.

"Finding an ideal situation is also difficult. That’s the job of the engineers with the set-up of the car" Mario Isola

For the avoidance of doubt and given Leclerc’s specific qualifying lament in Japan, we’re just discussing the art of getting the tyres ready for flying laps, rather than the other skills needed to manage the delicate rubber over long race stints.

“We design the tyres so we have, and we give this data to the teams, a footprint with a certain distribution of temperature and pressure,” Isola adds. “And when you run the car, the dynamic footprint has some modification in the shape, in the way that it is putting some additional heat on a certain point.

“A typical example is a blister. A blister is having an excess of heat, of energy, in a small band of the tyre. You overheat the compound; you generate gas inside the compound and you have this blistering. So, the ideal situation is to have a footprint that, as much as possible, is distributing the pressure and the temperature in an even way.

“To do that, it is the tyre design, but also the way in which a car is operating the tyre on the track. So, if you use too much camber, maybe you have an advantage in some conditions in cornering but you lose a lot in braking and traction and finding an ideal situation is also difficult. That’s the job of the engineers with the set-up of the car.

Changes for 2024 have helped Ferrari across a long run

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“So, the design of the car, the set-up of the car, the relation with the layout of the circuit and the level of grip that the circuit is able to generate – is something that can help or penalise the driver.”

It’s worth remembering here how Ferrari has changed its car for 2024 – with a particular focus on the floor breakthrough it made late in 2023 too – that appears to have led to a major breakthrough on in-race tyre preservation.

It’s therefore logical to expect its drivers to need different qualifying preparation tactics to stimulate the tyres to the ideal temperature windows we’ve outlined, which historically hasn’t been a problem for Ferrari.

In terms of what Pirelli sees all F1 drivers doing to achieve their prep lap targets, Isola says it concerns “what I said about the front and the rear – it’s probably the most important part of the preparation lap”.

“What they can do is to use braking and traction, and the speed while cornering, in a way that is not overstressing one axle compared to the other” he adds. “They collect data, they have sensors on the cars – so they know in real time what the surface temperature is, the carcass temperature, the pressure.

“And obviously after free practice, the engineers are also helping the drivers to understand all the details from each single lap to maximise the grip in any corner. It’s mainly balancing the front and the rear axle”.

Getting the cars out on track in qualifying to avoid traffic and 2024’s increased dirty air factor – compared to the 2022 start of the new ground-effect era that had eliminating this element as a key aim – is also vital.

Drivers have this year crawled out of the pits to create space to prepare in qualifying

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

It’s why the teams often have their drivers crawl out of the pits to create big gaps because, as Isola says, “you are looking for the peak of grip [to make a difference]”.

 “That’s why it’s so difficult to find the ideal conditions [on preparation laps],” he continues. “Because everyone is focused on finding exactly this peak of grip. It’s not a [big] window, it’s a point on a curve.”

Overall, the teams are so reticent on how they respectively deploy the prep lap tactics, which Isola acknowledges means “they’re not very happy to tell us a lot of details”.

Replicating Sainz’s more serene runs in the last two qualifying sessions will be a clear focus for Leclerc this weekend in China

But, back to Leclerc’s specific case, and Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur in Japan offered a different theory about his charge’s recent qualifying struggles.

“Where we missed a little bit the weekend [at Suzuka] with Charles was the first lap of Q1,” the Frenchman explained. “He didn't do a mega lap, and we had to put the second set [of soft C3s] on because we were a little bit at risk. And then you go to Q3, you have only one set.”

This followed Leclerc’s scrappy Melbourne qualifying session, where he opted for an extra Q2 run and then big front wing adjustments late in Q3 in the hope of transforming his form, which backfired on his final flier.

Then there was being put on used softs back for the first Q3 fliers in Bahrain, which Leclerc felt contributed to a blown pole shot due to disrupted rhythm. But this stemmed from him being unable to match Sainz’s pace immediately in Q1 and Ferrari feeling he might need an extra set of new softs to progress at that stage.

Where Leclerc has struggled, Sainz has found pace

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

And so, replicating Sainz’s more serene runs in the last two qualifying sessions will be a clear focus for Leclerc this weekend in China. He’ll even have two attempts at re-establishing his proven qualifying might, given the sprint weekend format.

Specifically, when it came to their Melbourne and Suzuka prep lap efforts for what would be their best qualifying times at each venue, the two Ferrari drivers diverged in tactics.

In Australia, where Sainz actually made an error on his quickest lap but still nevertheless improved as he ended up adrift of Verstappen, both started slowly and built up to speed.

But Sainz took the swoops of Turns 9/10 faster compared to the downshifting Leclerc, and then the Spaniard rather trickled out of Turns 11 and 13 before stamping on the gas, which will have given his rears an extra heat boost.

In Japan, Sainz used the same tactics out of the hairpin and Spoon Curve, while Leclerc also seemed to be later accelerating out of the final chicane to start his sole Q3 flier.

The GPS traces of the subsequent laps show Leclerc losing time to Sainz at the start and end, which suggests the latter reached the axle-balancing temperature window more solidly on his prep lap and so had more tyre life left come the flier’s climax.

Overall on those courses, for each driver, there was a big difference in how they had to treat the tyres on prep laps, with the former requiring a faster overall outlap due to its front limited layout and cool temperatures meaning increased rubber stimulation. The latter needed a gentle overall approach thanks to the high-energy corners and rough surface.

Sainz and Leclerc together on the podium in Australia

Photo by: Ferrari

Tiny margins again: a combined gap of 0.35s from Melbourne and Sainz meant the difference between Leclerc starting alongside Sainz and not much further back in each case we’ve assessed.

Given he’s adamant it was on tyre preparation where these weekends went awry, that alone is noteworthy.

It has, after all, exposed a rare and possibly temporary weakness in an otherwise excellent qualifying game from F1’s qualifying king of recent years.

Will Leclerc regain his qualifying mojo in China?

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images