Ferrari got it “wrong” by underestimating their performance in Monaco, and Charles Leclerc could not hide his disappointment after missing out on pole position.

That honour instead went to McLaren’s Lando Norris, who snatched the P1 grid slot from home hero Leclerc right at the end of Q3, the 1:09.954 from Norris serving as a new lap record around the streets of Monte Carlo as he got the better of Leclerc by a tenth.

Leclerc deflated in Monaco: ‘Wrong’ Ferrari expectations a double blow?

Only once so far in F1 2025 has Ferrari featured on the podium – that courtesy of Leclerc’s P3 result in Saudi Arabia – and coming to the slow-speed Monaco circuit, Ferrari had predicted this to be a track which would not suit their SF-25 challenger.

“Yes, we are worried,” Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur had admitted ahead of the Monaco GP. “If we don’t do a better job than this weekend [Imola], the next race will definitely be much harder.”

But, it turned out that Ferrari had little to worry about, with Leclerc topping all three practice sessions before narrowly losing out on pole to Norris.

However, Leclerc was having trouble seeing this as a positive performance versus expectations.

“No. I’m not satisfied,” he declared in the post-qualifying press conference, “because you forget very quickly with the expectations that you have going into a weekend when free practices are going so well. I think we were wrong with the expectations that we had.

“And at the end of the day, it was a lot more positive than what we initially thought. We still need to understand why, to be completely honest. For me, it’s an unknown. I don’t quite know why we are so fast in slow speed suddenly, but we’ll analyse that after the weekend. But no, disappointment is big.”

He added: “We expected to struggle a lot, which wasn’t the case because from FP1, it felt really, really good. The car felt good. I felt confident with the car straight away, and we’ve got to understand that… How we can reproduce that on all the tracks.

“Like if we take Miami, which was two race weekends ago, we were losing so much in the low-speed corners, and now we are very fast this weekend. So, obviously, there are other things that are also changing.

“The ride is not great here, and we know we’ve got a pretty good car in terms of ride. But I feel like there might be something else to be understood.”

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Pressed for any potential clues after a qualifying performance which saw him split the McLarens on the Monaco grid, Leclerc responded: “I think the only explanation I can find for now is that on a track like this, where there’s only low speed – basically no high-speed corners – in most of the tracks, we had to take compromises in order to not lose too much in high-speed corners.

“We don’t have to set up the car in a way where we compromise anything here because we just focus on the low speed. And when we are on these kinds of tracks, it seems that there’s some performance in the low speed from the car.

“But we are a little bit stuck at the moment on other tracks, so I don’t think we can apply it to any other tracks other than Monaco, unfortunately.”

Qualifying in Monaco is regarded as arguably the most critical such session on the F1 calendar, considering that overtaking is rarely seen.

However, the 2025 Monaco Grand Prix is a journey into the unknown, as for the first time, the FIA has mandated a minimum of two stops per driver in the race.

Asked whether he believes this will present more opportunities from P2 on the grid, Leclerc said: “I think it’s going to be a bit of chaos tomorrow, but we’ll see how it plays out.

“I think there’ll be a lot of strategy games, and we’ll see who comes out on top.

“But I think we might be under pressure from cars that we probably don’t expect, from the back, which might make everything interesting. We’ll see.”

Leclerc’s Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton was due to start P4, but saw that become P7 thanks to a three-place grid penalty incurred for impeding Max Verstappen.

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