Leclerc Pinpoints Ferrari's 2026 Problem: 'More Exposed' Than Mercedes

Charles Leclerc has delivered the most precise diagnosis yet of why Ferrari's 2026 campaign has not matched its early-season flashes of speed, and the answer is narrower and more technical than the usual "we need more power" line teams trot out when they are behind on engines. Speaking after qualifying at Suzuka, where he had watched the Mercedes-engined cars pull clear when conditions demanded a perfect energy-deployment lap, Leclerc pointed not to the combustion side of Ferrari's power unit but to something less visible: the way the software manages, releases and recovers energy across a single Q3 run. "The only thing that we struggle on our side for now is whenever we push in Q3," Leclerc said. "The optimization of the system is struggling a little bit, and then we lose times in the straight. So we lost a lot of lap time in the last run." He went further when asked directly how Ferrari compared to the Mercedes power unit Mercedes' own cars and customers are using. "I felt for some reason that we are a little bit more exposed to that compared to maybe the Mercedes engine, which is something that we need to look at." That is a materially different admission from the earlier-season Ferrari narrative. When Fred Vasseur and his drivers described Ferrari's 2026 problem in Melbourne and China, the language was about raw straight-line pace and about the challenge of finding grip with the new ground-effect floor. Leclerc's Suzuka framing is more surgical. The SF-26 is not, on his telling, a slow car. It is a car whose hybrid system drops more lap time than a Mercedes-powered car does when a driver pushes hardest. In 2026 regulations terms, that is a software and deployment-strategy problem as much as it is a hardware one — and it is one Leclerc knows Ferrari cannot brute-force its way out of. Engine homologation rules lock the internal combustion engine architecture in for the season. What is open to development, within tight constraints, is the way Ferrari's power unit chooses when and how to deploy and harvest. That is precisely the area Leclerc says the team is behind in. He was clear about the timeline. "I think doing a step back on those first three races, there's a clear thing that we need to improve and this is surely the power unit. But we obviously cannot bring anything to Miami," Leclerc said. "But there's not only that, and in a year like this one, everything is very new. I think the rate of improvements of every team is massive. So there's a lot more than just the power unit. There's putting the tires in the right window. There's the aero, there's the chassis, and on that we'll work flat out in order to try and close the gap as much as possible to the Mercedes." The hesitation over Miami is important. The Miami Grand Prix in early May was already being circled as the moment when several teams expected to bring their first major 2026 upgrade package. Ferrari, by Leclerc's own admission, will not. Whatever is being prepared at Maranello for the restart will arrive later — and by then, Mercedes will have had three more race weekends to refine its own deployment mapping. Leclerc was similarly careful not to understate the gap. "I don't think it's as close as what maybe people think," he said of Ferrari's distance to Mercedes. "Obviously seeing the first few races, we see lots of fightings between the cars, which is actually quite nice. But as soon as you are a little bit suboptimal with these cars, you lose a lot of lap time. So our only chance to stay with them is to annoy them in the first few laps. But as soon as they get free air, they've shown their real pace in the last races. And I think there are still these four, five tenths that we've seen throughout these first two races." Four to five tenths, in 2026 money, is not unbridgeable — but it is significant. Leclerc's broader point is that Ferrari's answer cannot be a single upgrade. "We must not forget that there are huge gains in developing also the chassis, the aerodynamics, putting the tires in the right temp in the right window, and all of this makes the difference," he said. "Surely the engine we cannot change it for now anyway. In the meantime, we need to improve absolutely everything around the car." The takeaway from Suzuka is that Leclerc, at least, thinks the SF-26 is a project that can still come back during the season — but not by fixing one thing. The deployment problem that Mercedes does not have is the problem Ferrari has to solve without the ability to touch its engine. That is a much harder engineering puzzle than the one implied by the "we need more power" headline. --- *Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/leclerc-ferrari-more-exposed-deployment-than-mercedes-engine-2026). Visit for full coverage.*