Extraordinary qualifying performances have been Charles Leclerc's calling card throughout his Formula 1 career. But by his own estimation, he's "not doing the job" in qualifying in 2025.
Is that really true? His qualifying performances this season relative to Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton have been strong, but the numbers are slightly less overwhelming than you might expect. His underlying pace has been better than Hamilton's most of the time, and he has a 9-5 advantage across the 14 qualifying sessions so far, with an average adjusted advantage of 0.133 seconds.
On paper, that's a superb record against the driver with the most pole positions in F1 history, but Leclerc knows it could be better.
"I'm not doing the job," said Leclerc. "Since the beginning of the season, I've been performing very well in the races and there are actually not many races where I will go back to change something that I've done inside the car.
"Unfortunately, when I look back at qualifying, which used to be my strength, there are many [sessions] where I'd like to go back and change something because every time I get to Q3 it's not clicking for some reason. We've had good qualifyings, but we haven’t had great qualifying [form].
"This used to be my strength, [I'm] not happy with the level I'm showing. In qualifying we've got issues for sure, particularly from Q2 onwards we've been fighting with something inside the car, but it's not an excuse; I need to be better."
The mysterious problem has not yet been explained. Given the explanation that it's particularly limiting in Q3, it is likely to be related to some aspect of the power unit package when it comes to energy management and the impact of the build up of temperature.
However, Leclerc is very clear that his struggles are independent of this, in that he is underachieving by not getting the most from the car in Q3 even when that is taken into account.
The most recent round at Silverstone was a classic example of this. Leclerc's final Q3 run was near-as-makes-no-difference the same as his best lap in Q2 - leading to Leclerc berating himself over the radio.
And it's not an isolated case. His Austria qualifying was decent enough, but not extraordinary - he was only 0.009s quicker than Hamilton - and his final lap in Canada was ruined after a flying start when he overdid it in dirty air from Isack Hadjar.
It’s been a similar story across the whole season. In Spain, he was frustrated after using his one set of fresh softs on the first run, while tyre prep was compromised in Monaco and cost him a little speed through Ste Devote on his way to second on the grid. At Imola, Ferrari struggled with the new C6 Pirellis.
Working back to the start of the season, Miami was solid enough, in Saudi Arabia he battled understeer and oversteer but probably couldn't have done better than fourth, and Bahrain - where he qualified second - was arguably one of his stronger laps. Prior to that, Japan was solid but imperfect, in China Hamilton had the edge in both sessions, and in Australia there was a struggle with tyres.
While there isn't a specific pattern through those sessions, there is a general trend. There is not a single qualifying performance that you would consider close to a Leclerc classic, a brilliant lap where he extracts everything from the car with a livewire, on-the-limit drive.
Take any 12-event sample set from Leclerc's career and you won't find such a run-of-the-mill set of qualifying performances. It's not that he’s been bad, and by most standards he's been delivering at a good level, but he's lacking the single-lap magic that you would expect.
And that says everything about where Ferrari is. Leclerc worked hard to create what he described as an "extreme" set-up early in the season. That helped to mitigate the chronic understeer in the high-speed corners and made for a car that could be stronger in the races, but it's clearly not giving him what he would ideally want.
It's true Leclerc isn't maximising qualifying, although his performances are objectively still decent overall when it comes to single laps. With Ferrari set to bring its rear suspension tweaks to Spa that should allow the car to run lower and, with the resulting set-up changes, it might be the case that the Ferrari becomes a car that's easier to balance.
If that's the case, it won't just be the car's outright pace that is the evidence for this, but whether Leclerc can pull some of the stunning qualifying laps out of the bag that have been the hallmark of his F1 career in the second half of the year.
