Leclerc admits he cannot match Hamilton's pace as Ferrari SF-26 struggles persist at Silverstone

Charles Leclerc is still searching for answers with Ferrari’s SF-26, admitting after Friday’s British Grand Prix sprint qualifying at Silverstone that Lewis Hamilton is more consistently reaching the car’s ceiling while he is not.

Hamilton claimed sprint pole, leaving Leclerc — who settled for fourth on the sprint grid — more than three tenths adrift of his team-mate. It is a reversal of the dynamic that defined much of last season, when Leclerc regularly outqualified his predecessor Carlos Sainz and established himself as one of the grid’s most clinical one-lap performers.

“Lewis is more often at 100% of the potential of the car, which I’m not,” Leclerc said. “So I’ve got to work on everything really.”

The Monegasque driver explained that the problem is not confined to a single area. Even when he strings a lap together, the margins he is losing to Hamilton are measured in hundredths rather than tenths — yet they accumulate into a meaningful gap. “Even when I push and when I put things together, we speak about hundreds,” he said, underlining how fine the deficit is and how difficult it is to isolate.

Leclerc switched from Brembo to Carbone Industrie brake discs following the Monaco Grand Prix in an attempt to improve his braking feel, and while that change has offered some benefit, it has not resolved the deeper issues with his relationship with the car.

His struggles are also inconsistent in character, which complicates the search for a fix. In Austria, Leclerc felt comfortable through practice and qualifying — lining up ahead of Hamilton on the grid — only for race pace to become the problem on Sunday. At Silverstone, the single-lap deficit returned as the primary concern.

“When you don’t quite get the feeling, then it’s difficult to extract the lap time and to have the confidence for every Saturday going into qualifying to get to the limit of the car, which I’m struggling to do,” he said. “In SQ1 and SQ2 I was close to it, and I was also quite confident for SQ3, but then I lost the car. I just don’t feel the car as well as I should.”

The frustration is compounded by the fact that the SF-26 clearly has pace. Ferrari surprised even themselves on Friday at Silverstone, with the car showing competitive potential that the team had not fully anticipated heading into the weekend. That underlying speed makes Leclerc’s inability to unlock it consistently all the more pressing — both for him personally and for Ferrari’s championship ambitions as the 2026 season develops.