The Monegasque is famed for his strong qualifying game, yet it’s here, specifically in the dark art of ‘prep laps’, that he has a weakness he’s determined to address
ALEX KALINAUCKAS
Four races into the 2024 Formula 1 campaign, with the stunning, true test of a racing car that Suzuka poses reached earlier than ever before, the trends of the new season are established. F1 has even progressed far enough into its 2024 offering that mini-trends within the main plots can be detected. And here we find two that are intriguingly intertwined.
The first is just how close things are behind Red Bull, where small driver mistakes in qualifying or on car set-up can make a massive difference to grid positions and race results. The second is how F1’s current qualifying speed king – Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – has surprisingly struggled of late against the clock.
After qualifying three and four places behind team-mate Carlos Sainz in Melbourne and at Suzuka respectively, Leclerc declared, “two races now in a row, I’ve been struggling to put the tyres in the right window” when it comes to qualifying. What this meant in F1’s compressed field is that a tiny 0.104-second gap at Suzuka resulted in a hefty difference between Sainz and Leclerc on the grid.
Dark art, pseudo-science. What Leclerc is getting at is the complex, but critical, focus each team places on extracting peak grip from the tyres in qualifying at each F1 event. This is what the drivers must do on out-laps – ‘prep laps’ in their collective lexicon – to get the rubber in the required shape to work with the aerodynamic packages. It’s when this doesn’t happen correctly that those nouns above get spouted.
The main focus on prep laps for drivers means working to get the front and rear axles in a tyre temperature balance to deliver the car handling sweet spot they all want. Hot enough for the rubber to be switched on but not overly so and risk the tyres cooking through thermal degradation. By reaching this point, it’s easier to keep the tyres in the best shape on what Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola calls the “grip curve of a compound” that “can be flattened as much as possible, but it’s still a curve”.
Historically, Leclerc has been a master of finding the peak of the curve to get best tyre performance in qualifying. His hefty, controlled-aggression driving style does leave him open to suddenly traversing the curve and those occasional wild moments and crashes. That’s if he can’t modulate the big
