Another tough qualifying for Leclerc: 'Paying the price today'

Whilst his teammate Carlos Sainz made it through to Q3, Leclerc was eliminated in Q2. Neither driver was too happy about their performance, given the team started off strong at the start, winning races. "We are just struggling a lot at the moment," Leclerc told GPblog and others in the paddock. "I feel like yesterday we learned a good amount for the team by splitting the cars. That comes also with the fact that you are not really optimising your weekend and focusing on performance only. Obviously today we lost out to Q3 by a tenth and it was the first time I was driving with this configuration on the dry after FP3 in wet so all in all, we are struggling to optimize the weekend but I think that it will help us long term what we've done yesterday, however, I feel like we're paying a little bit the price today of it."

Where did it go wrong for Leclerc?

Leclerc was once second in the Driver's championship, competing against Max Verstappen for the title. Now, he seems to be falling further down the grid. As he shared, the team are working to find out what has affected their performance after reverting back to the Imola specification on the car. "It was a little bit better and that is the main reason why we came back to the to the old package," the Ferrari driver revealed. "I won't go too much into detail but for sure we've lost some performance since Monaco as a matter of fact and we are looking into it, that's also why we are doing all these tests. We came to the conclusion that it was the right choice to come back for this weekend mostly because of bouncing. And we'll make the right decision for the future very soon. And what we've done yesterday was very helpful to help us take the right decision going forward."

Mercedes were in a similar position at the start of the season, but have now turned things around as they start one-two tomorrow. "Well, now Mercedes is in front, McLaren is in front, Red Bull is in front and we are the ones that have been struggling. Since too many races we need to bounce back and try and find the balance and just the performance that is in the car that we don't quite find from that," Leclerc said. Nevertheless, the Monegasque hopes that the weather can help them out tomorrow, with rain forecasted once again. "Anything can help us. The worst thing would be a normal race with the same strategy for everybody so I'm welcoming the rain if there is some," he concluded.