2025 Japan GP Ferrari Lewis Hamilton FP1. Image credit: Liauzh/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ferrari had a perfectly good explanation for Austin qualifying ready before the cars were back in the garage: the straights. Lewis Hamilton said rivals keep accelerating where the Ferrari lifts, and he put the Red Bull Ford power unit’s advantage at roughly three to four tenths a lap, while admitting he hadn’t seen the data that weekend. It is a tidy story. It is also only half of what the official timing sheet says.
Here is the awkward detail: Charles Leclerc’s quickest lap of the weekend came in Q2, not Q3. He went 1:34.198 to top the second session, then 1:34.267 in the shootout. Had he simply repeated the Q2 lap, it would have been quicker than every Q3 time except Kimi Antonelli’s pole lap of 1:34.035. A straight-line deficit doesn’t switch on between sessions, so something else changed in Q3.
The same car, a different Q3
Lining up each driver’s Q2 and Q3 laps is revealing. Hamilton found 0.522s between sessions and still ended up fifth, 0.276s off pole. Isack Hadjar found 0.637s. Max Verstappen found 0.257s and Antonelli 0.243s. Leclerc found nothing; he went backwards by 0.069s and finished fourth, 0.232s adrift.
Leclerc’s own explanation was the track cooling down and the tyres not coming up to temperature cleanly in Q3. Fred Vasseur said Ferrari was in the pole fight until the final corner. Those aren’t the words of a team that was out-powered by half a second down the straights. They describe a team that left time in the final sector on a one-lap run where the window for the tyres is narrow.
To be clear, Hamilton’s straight-line complaint can be true at the same time. A car that gives away a few tenths in a straight line needs everything else to be perfect on a qualifying lap, and Ferrari’s margin for a slightly cold tyre is thinner than it looks. That is my read, not something either driver said, but it fits the numbers: Ferrari looked like pole contenders in Q2 and a fraction short in Q3 because the margin vanished the moment the tyres weren’t ideal.
Why Sunday made the grid look unfair
The race made fifth and fourth on the grid look like an undercount. Leclerc finished second, 13.078s behind Antonelli, and Hamilton was fourth, 18.515s back, per the official race classification. Hamilton’s post-race diagnosis wasn’t engine power at all. He called balance his biggest issue and said he couldn’t rotate the car as well as Leclerc, who had more front wing, and he started without a new set of tyres, which he said puts him on the back foot.
That last point matters. Mercedes and Red Bull both held back new softs for the race, according to F1’s official post-qualifying round-up. A Q3 that goes slightly wrong doesn’t just cost grid slots; it can cost the choice of tyres on Sunday. Leclerc also said Ferrari hadn’t seriously considered the one-stop strategy that Mercedes ran, which is covered in our look at how Antonelli’s one-stop won Austin.
The take: fixable beats frustrating
Three explanations in one weekend, from Hamilton, Leclerc and Vasseur, don’t conflict, but they aren’t equally useful. Hamilton said Ferrari can’t make a big enough step this season to close the straight-line gap. If that’s right, it’s a constraint to manage. The tyre-window problem is the one Ferrari can actually do something about before the next one-lap run, through preparation laps, out-lap pace and where the final push starts.
Ferrari has been here before this season. Its split plan in Singapore showed how a promising weekend can come apart through execution rather than raw pace. Austin’s Sunday pace was there. The Saturday conversion wasn’t.
What to watch in Mexico City
Qualifying in Mexico City is on Saturday, 31 October, with the race on Sunday, 1 November, according to the official F1 schedule. Antonelli arrives with a 123-point championship lead, so the title story will dominate, but the Ferrari story is quieter and arguably more interesting. If Leclerc and Hamilton leave Q3 within a tenth of their Q2 laps, the straights were never the whole answer. If they again fade in the shootout, the engine explanation starts to look like a convenient place to put an uncomfortable tyre problem.
Lead image: Photo by Liauzh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Author
