Why Ferrari's practice pace faded in Austin qualifying: cold tyres and a power deficit
Ferrari led all three practice sessions at the Circuit of The Americas, then qualified fourth and fifth. Charles Leclerc blamed tyre temperature, Lewis Hamilton the power unit, and team principal Fred Vasseur said the last lap simply was not good enough.
From practice sweep to second and third row
Ferrari arrived in Austin as the team to beat. Its drivers topped every practice session, and the upgrade package brought to Texas looked to have paid off. Then qualifying arrived, and the picture changed: Charles Leclerc ended up fourth, 0.232 s behind Kimi Antonelli's pole time, with Lewis Hamilton fifth.
The drivers offered two different explanations, and the team principal a third view.
Leclerc: the tyres would not wake up
Leclerc said the final Q3 runs came at a cooler moment. He estimated track temperature had fallen by one or two degrees compared with Q2, with more cloud arriving, and that he was sliding from the out-lap onwards. He explained that the car runs its tyres cool, which is an advantage on Sunday, but makes it hard to put heat into them for one fast lap. "Where we've lost is in ourselves, and that is mostly the tyres," he said, according to Crash.net.
The Race added that Leclerc's final Q3 lap was slower than his best Q2 lap, which would have been enough for the front row.
Hamilton: the engine is the gap
Hamilton's out-lap and final lap were both clean, he said, so he put the loss elsewhere. He pointed to the power unit, saying the deficit to Red Bull and Mercedes is still "significant" and that Ferrari is "a few tenths off on the straight". His estimate was that the Red Bull-Ford unit was worth roughly three to five tenths per lap on the straights.
The Race backed part of that with speed data: at the end of the long back straight Leclerc was about 5 km/h slower than Hamilton and about 10 km/h slower than Antonelli. It also noted that the deficit looked consistent through Q1, Q2 and Q3, which does not fit the idea that rivals turned their engines up for the last run. The same report said Hamilton made a small mistake at the final corner.
Vasseur: not the weather
Fred Vasseur rejected conditions as the main excuse. He said Ferrari had the potential for at least the first row and that its drivers were fighting for pole until the last corner. Conditions, he argued, affected all teams equally, so the job was to deliver a better final lap.
By the numbers
In our timing data Ferrari has not taken a pole position in any of the 18 qualifying sessions of 2026; Mercedes has the most poles, with Antonelli on seven. In races, Ferrari has two wins and 11 podium finishes in 17 rounds, and 383 points, second to Mercedes with 513. It finished on the podium in the last two races, third in Bahrain and second in Singapore.
The tyre explanation, if correct, would help on Sunday, since Ferrari's gentle treatment of its rubber is a strength over a race distance. A power deficit on a long straight is harder to manage. The race starts at 20:00 UTC, with Leclerc and Hamilton on the grid behind Antonelli, Verstappen and Hadjar before any penalty changes.
