Ferrari left Spa qualifying fifth and sixth on the grid, and both cars had a story to tell. Charles Leclerc believes a badly placed yellow flag cost him a grid slot, while Lewis Hamilton spent the afternoon chasing a car that never felt the same after a heavy FP3 crash.
Leclerc's grievance came on his final flying lap. A yellow flag meant for a car stopped at the pit entry was, in his view, shown where drivers on track could see it, forcing him to lift. "I'm a bit disappointed for that last lap because there was a yellow flag that was supposed to be for the pit entry, but that was too visible, in my opinion, being on track," he said. "It was very much in the middle and that probably cost me one position."
He was careful not to overstate it. "I wouldn't have done a crazy better lap time and a half second was still there. But one position would have been possible," Leclerc added. He ended up fifth, 0.532s off pole and just 0.024s behind Russell in fourth — small enough that the lift genuinely mattered.
Team principal Fred Vasseur backed his driver but accepted the marshals had followed procedure. "Hadjar was stopped in the pit lane in parc ferme and the marshal put out a yellow flag at the pit entry, but the pit entry is on track and Charles had to lift a little bit," Vasseur said. "It's the rule. When the car in front of you is 0.030s faster, it's a bit tough."
The yellow flag was not Ferrari's only headache. Leclerc had spent much of the weekend hunting a mysterious deficit. "The weekend has been very tough for a different reason than previously," he explained. "We've had unfortunately something that we can explain now, but that was difficult to understand, where I was losing half a second, four tenths in the straights all the time." The culprit, he said, was traced late: "It was a power unit thing that we saw and changed."
On the other side of the garage, Hamilton was rebuilding from a bigger setback. His FP3 shunt sent the mechanics into a scramble, and while they got the SF-26 back out for qualifying, it did not drive like the car he had earlier in the day. "The car was feeling amazing P3 and I really felt confident, not that we'd be fighting for pole because I think Mercedes are too fast, but I definitely think with the car that we had in P3 we probably could have been third or something like that," Hamilton said.
The repaired car cost him. "I was missing a couple of tenths once I got to qualy," he said, before pinpointing where. "Something wasn't the same on the rear suspension, so I think the balance wasn't the same basically as the FP3, which the car was feeling really great." Hamilton qualified sixth, two-tenths adrift of Leclerc.
Both Ferraris start behind the Mercedes and Verstappen, and both drivers flagged the same underlying worry: straight-line speed at a track where the tow is everything. Leclerc summed up the hope for Sunday plainly — a good slipstream, and a cleaner run than the one Saturday handed them.
---