Ferrari US GP qualifying ends with fourth and fifth
Ferrari US GP qualifying finished with Charles Leclerc fourth and Lewis Hamilton fifth, and the team's wait for a first Grand Prix pole position since August 2025 goes on. The Scuderia had topped all three practice sessions in Austin and went into Q3 as the widely tipped favourite. They came out of it behind both Red Bull drivers and Mercedes polesitter Kimi Antonelli.
The shape of the session was odd. Leclerc was second fastest in Q1 behind McLaren's Lando Norris, but only after Norris took a second run to get there, and Leclerc then led the field in Q2. On the first runs of Q3 he sat a provisional fourth with Hamilton sixth. Hamilton found one place on his final effort; Leclerc did not move, ending 0.276s off pole.
Team principal Frederic Vasseur told Sky Sports F1: "Bit of mixed feelings for sure. The potential was there over the weekend. We had good pace in free practice. Until the last corner we are fighting for pole but it is like it is."
The weekend carried Ferrari's final significant upgrade of the season, which makes the gap between practice pace and Q3 pace the central question rather than a footnote.
Hamilton points to a straight-line deficit
On the radio after the session Hamilton sounded genuinely puzzled: "These guys must be turning up for that last Q3 because where did that time go?" Speaking afterwards, he rejected the idea that the car had changed character between sessions.
"We did a really good job overnight. The car felt really good in FP3 - competitive," said Hamilton, who had topped that final practice. "Q1 and Q2 both felt pretty strong... we didn't make any changes, the car didn't flip upside down in Q3. It was a really good lap."
His explanation is mechanical and familiar. "Ultimately we do lose, I think we are a few tenths off on the straight as we usually are, but a great lap by Kimi and the power deficit to the Red Bull and Mercedes is still significant. Our car is clearly as good as theirs through the corners but we lose that down the straights."
Leclerc blames track temperature and tyres
Leclerc read the same lap differently. He does not believe Red Bull or Mercedes found a new step between Q2 and Q3, and instead traced the loss to his own side of the garage and to the rubber.
"This time I think it's slightly different in that I don't think the others have changed anything from Q2 to Q3. Where we have lost is on ourselves and that is mostly the tyres," he said. "The out lap was extremely difficult. There was a bit more cloud in Q3. We lost one or two degrees of track temp and, for us, it was night and day different."
That is a narrow window to work with: a couple of degrees of asphalt temperature, and a car that had led Q2 could not get its tyres into the right place on the lap that counted.
What Ferrari can still take from Austin
Sunday's race runs 56 laps on a circuit where overtaking is possible and tyre degradation is expected to be high. Leclerc is not writing off the afternoon, pointing to the last time he started fourth here, two years ago, when he won.
"Just a good start and then where you position your car and trying to anticipate what is going to happen [is key] because there are many different scenarios that can happen in such a turn one with very wide entry," he said. "Then if you are doing the right choices you can get a lot more than any other track."
Hamilton was more guarded, and his caution is grounded in the data from Friday's long runs, where degradation was higher than the team had anticipated. "Starting position isn't everything. You have to have really good pace to overtake," he said. "To beat the Red Bulls and Mercedes will be challenging, for sure, but we will give it absolutely everything."
The original report is from skysports.com.
