Nate SaundersNov 22, 2025, 03:14 AM ET
LAS VEGAS -- Charles Leclerc called Ferrari's Las Vegas Grand Prix qualifying performance "embarrassing" and said it was a showcase of the issues the team has faced in wet conditions since his arrival.
Leclerc could qualify only ninth for Saturday's race, and teammate Lewis Hamilton finished dead last for what appeared to be Ferrari's last chance to prevent 2025 being a winless season.
The team's superstar drivers arrived at Sin City this week downplaying recent critical comments from Ferrari president John Elkann, who had said the pair needed to "focus on driving and talk less" and improve their own performances.
Leclerc made his frustration clear on the radio immediately after crossing the line. "My god, embarrassing, f---ing embarrassing. F---ing hell, I don't get how we can be so off the pace. ... There's, like, zero grip, zero f---ing grip," he said.
Friday evening's session had started in rain so heavy that teams opted to swap onto the full wets rather than slicks, something that has become a rarity in F1's more recent past.
Speaking in the media pen shortly afterwards, Leclerc elaborated that his frustration with Ferrari's wet-weather performances can be traced all the way back to when he joined the team in 2019.
"Unfortunately it's not [just] today," Leclerc told F1 TV. "It's been like that since I joined the team; we've been struggling massively at finding the grip in those kind of conditions. It's hugely frustrating because it's probably been my biggest strength in the junior categories and then...
"We are doing something wrong. I have no idea what that is because we've turned the car upside down. We've had Lewis and obviously Carlos before [from] other teams who could tell us the feeling they had with the other cars. It's just extremely difficult to find the grip with our car. Very, very unpredictable with our car, which causes us to do a lot of mistakes. It's not that we are not trying because as a team we have tried absolutely everything. For some reason, we just haven't found our way yet."
Hamilton, who, like Leclerc, has been considered a master of wet conditions in the past, struggled from the beginning as he was eliminated from the first session.
"The car was feeling great in FP3, and I honestly thought it was going to go well. Yeah, I was really, really excited," Hamilton said.
"Thought finally we'd have a good day, but it didn't."
