Leclerc: "Monza should be a track where we are strong"

Charles Leclerc has admitted that he has been left confused over a poor qualifying performance that saw him knocked out in Q1. The Monegasque driver ended the first qualifying session in 17th but was just 0.002s off of Romain Grosjean and progressing into the next phase of qualifying.

Speaking to the media after qualifying, Leclerc summarised his qualifying performance as disappointing but couldn't understand why the Sauber was left so far down the order.

“One thing is for sure I had absolutely nobody in front of me for any slipstreams,” Leclerc admitted.

“But again that doesn’t justify our lack of performance today. For now we still need to analyse obviously, still quite fresh, we need to analyse what was wrong. There was definitely something.

“Because Monza should be a track where we are strong. Like in FP2 and FP3, so to see us out in Q1… after in my opinion a very good lap because I was very happy about my lap.

“I think you saw a mistake from my side on TV but that was on my second push lap when anyway the tyres were gone so that didn’t really affect my performance.

“The first lap was very good. Just a shame to be out in Q1.

“We are the slowest car on the straight, which is not normal, because we are normally one of the quickest.

“We still need to do some analyse as we believe there is something wrong.”

Although he will move up to 15th via Daniel Ricciardo's demotion for power unit penalties, Leclerc will be thoroughly disappointed to not make it further in the qualifying session and leaving himself with a lot of work to do to reach the points during the Italian Grand Prix.