The day before practice began in Monaco Charles Leclerc made it clear he did not fancy his chances of repeating his 2024 victory from pole position.
“Our car hasn’t been particularly strong in low-speed corners,” he said. “And there’s only low-speed corners here in Monaco. So on paper, it doesn’t look like the most promising track for us.”
But he added a caveat: “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.”
Having topped the first two practice sessions on Friday, it looks like that has indeed happened for Leclerc. Could Ferrari break the McLaren-Red Bull duopoly of poles and wins this year at Leclerc’s home track?
Teams’ 2024 performance in context
Last year Monaco was the first track where Ferrari took pole position (indeed, it was the first track where anyone other than Max Verstappen took pole position). In relative terms, this was one of Red Bull’s weaker venues, though Haas, Aston Martin and most notably Sauber under-performed compared to their average pace across the season.
Around half of the Monaco circuit has been resurfaced this year, which has made it smoother than before in places. As was the case last weekend at Imola, Pirelli has brought tyres that are one stage softer.
These factors might ordinarily be expected to lead to faster lap times. But Monaco tends to be very ‘green’ early in a weekend and the grip levels increase rapidly, which likely explains why only one team has already lapped faster than they managed last year. This is Sauber, who were over a second off their rivals’ pace 12 months ago.
Teams’ 2024 and 2025 times
Ferrari’s pace advantage over McLaren on the soft tyres in second practice was narrow: just three hundredths of a second. But most encouragingly for the team they were quicker than all their rivals across all three compounds: Leclerc on the soft (1’11.355) and hard (1’12.103), Lewis Hamilton on the medium (1’12.025).
Throughout the season so far Red Bull have tended to lap further off the pace on Friday, then close the gap on Saturday. The pattern so far this weekend looks strikingly similar to Imola: Verstappen was well off the front-running pace in second practice, but the almost non-existent gap between the two Red Bulls does not compare at all to what we’ve seen in qualifying, where Yuki Tsunoda has barely been any closer to him than Liam Lawson was.
The picture is muddied further by the high impact traffic and red flags had on drivers’ opportunities to set flying lap times on Friday. But even factoring all that in, Ferrari look more competitive in Monaco than they have all year.
Leclerc has taken pole position for three of the last four races in Monaco (he was unable to start there in 2021 after suffering a technical problem during his reconnaissance laps). Remarkably, just a week after Ferrari’s double Q2 exit in their home race at Imola, he might have a shot at pole at his home race after all.
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