Mark Hughes: 'Leclerc is Senna-like at Monaco but his Ferrari's a dud'

Charles Leclerc hasn’t yet got the Monaco record of those masters of the place Graham Hill, Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher but he is every bit as mesmerising around this place – his native streets – as the best of them.

Last weekend he qualified and finished only second in a Ferrari that was way more competitive than usual but still not a McLaren match. This only became clear as McLaren turned up its power unit in qualifying. Up until then Leclerc had headed every practice session and was particularly stunning through Tabac corner, a gear up on everyone else and carrying and advantage of 5km/h (3mph) over the next fastest.

He came into the weekend insisting the Ferrari would not be competitive because of how poor its performance has been in the slow corners in previous races. That was not the full story, though. There were reasons why the Ferrari’s previous slow corner shortfall might not apply here. As he probably knew. But it was as if he was trying to manage his own expectations in a season which has proved to be such a disappointment, a season in which he felt he was finally going to be fighting for the world title after the long years of slog through the team’s turbulent times. Instead he’s been given a dud.

But it was a genuinely quick car in Bahrain testing, and in Melbourne and Shanghai for the opening two races. The disqualification of Lewis Hamilton’s car in China for excessive plank wear meant that subsequently it had to be run to a higher ride height than its floor has been designed for. It seems that in shrinking the rear end to give the more rearwards cockpit, the damper is simply too small, not powerful enough to prevent the floor rubbing excessively through high speed corners and straights. Raising the car has lost it a lot of downforce — in the slow corners in particular, as that is when the diffuser is running at its highest.

To get around that Ferrari and Leclerc together came up with a set-up which has opened the corner speed window at which the car is balanced, but it has even further punished the car’s previously excellent slow corner performance. None of those limitations applied at Monaco, there being no fast corners. It could revert to its pre-China set-up, where its lovely low-speed traits would reappear. There was a rearward-facing camera shot from Lando Norris’s car as Leclerc and Oscar Piastri were right behind him through Mirabeau and it was visible just how much more the Ferrari could be manipulated than Piastri’s McLaren even once they were already mid-corner. It could also climb over the kerbs with far less disruption than the stiffer-looking McLaren. The low-down response of its power unit fired it out of those slow corners with more acceleration. It just wasn’t as good on the brakes and in qualifying didn’t control its rear tyre temperatures as well by the end of the lap. But it was close.

Leclerc dominated this race from pole last year in the less troublesome ’24 car – but that was just the rubber-stamping of what had long been obvious about the Ferrari-Leclerc combination around here. We didn’t see it in his first race here for the team, in 2019, when Ferrari had misjudged the track evolution in Q1 and had kept him in the pits. Not making it into Q2 he made a desperate few moves in the early part of the race until eventually crashing, something which he’d almost predicted.