Ferrari F1 car must ‘surprise us’ to repeat Monaco GP fairytale win

Charles Leclerc says Ferrari’s specific low-speed weakness is going to make it extremely difficult to repeat 2024’s home win at the F1 Monaco Grand Prix.

Last year Leclerc finally found redemption around his home streets, taking his first win from pole following several years of heartbreak and near-misses at the Principality. The popular win led to emotional scenes after the race as Ferrari’s season got off to an encouraging start with one win apiece for Leclerc and team-mate Carlos Sainz as well as seven further podiums.

That was before McLaren stole a march on the rest of the field and Ferrari’s suffered a form dip, which it recovered from by the end of the year. But the Scuderia has not met targets for its 2025 car, and has been well behind McLaren while also being outscored by Mercedes and Max Verstappen in the only frontrunning Red Bull.

While Ferrari is still hard at work to salvage its season rather than focusing on 2026 – with more upgrades coming in Barcelona – the SF-25’s main weakness in low-speed corners has been a key attribute that is set to be punished around the narrow confines of the principality, rendering Leclerc much more pessimistic this time.

When asked how he rated his chances to fight for another home win, Leclerc replied: “If you want an honest answer, then low, because unfortunately our car hasn’t been particularly strong in low-speed corners and there’s only low-speed corners here in Monaco.

“On paper, it doesn’t look like the most promising track for us. But Monaco is so unique and so different from anything we race on over the season that we can have a good surprise once we put the car down tomorrow – which I hope will happen.

“And if it does, then I hope to be there on Saturday because qualifying will remain the most important part of the weekend. But on paper, it’s going to be a tough one.”

But with Monaco being so unique in terms of corner layouts, tarmac and bumps, the usual rules don’t always apply here, which is leaving the door ajar for Leclerc.

“There’s been years where we definitely did not expect to be on pole, and when you think that you have zero hopes, you just go for it – maybe a little bit more than people that are trying to manage expectations in Q3. And you manage to do something special, like we did in 2021 where we were nowhere all season, but we managed to put it on pole here,” Leclerc added.

“So, I still have hopes that we can reproduce what happened last year. Obviously, it’s still very fresh in my mind to come back in this paddock. The last time I was there, we won, and it was a very special moment for me.”

With Monaco set-ups so singularly focused on low-speed performance, it means teams have to worry much less about finding a balanced set-up that is performing across wildly different corner types. That could be one way for Ferrari to find performance where it is not expecting it.

“That’s definitely one of the questions we also asked ourselves coming here,” Leclerc agreed. “The answer, we’ll have it on track tomorrow. We don’t really know yet what to expect. But it is true that there’s only low-speed here.

“So obviously, we’ll try and focus and put the car in the best place possible for low-speed corners, whereas normally on most other tracks you just try and find a compromise between high-speed content and low-speed content.

“I hope we’ll discover something new about our car that we haven’t seen yet since the beginning of the season.”