Charles Leclerc’s latest foul-mouthed rant over Ferrari radio in F1 Japanese GP qualifying

Charles Leclerc has once again raged about his Formula 1 qualifying frustrations in a foul-mouthed rant over team radio at the Japanese Grand Prix.

Leclerc, who fumed over team radio about the deployment of his Ferrari engine after sprint qualifying in China, was left frustrated after taking fourth place on the grid at Suzuka.

The Monegasque driver looked as if he might threaten Kimi Antonelli’s pole position time when he went fastest in the first sector on his final lap of Q3, only to lose time following a snap of oversteer out of Spoon Curve.

After qualifying ended, Leclerc pressed his radio button to lament: "I honestly cannot stand this qualifying. “F*****g joke. I go faster in corners, throttle earlier and I am losing everything in the straight.”

Leclerc’s biggest gripe with F1’s much-maligned 2026 regulations is that his high-risk approach to his final qualifying laps is no longer paying off.

“I stayed pretty calm I would say it [heart rate] was a little bit higher when on the straights you start losing time because you are flat out and that’s where my heart rate goes particularly high,” he explained.

“In the corner itself, these are kind of things that happen in Q3, especially with my driving style. I know it happens very often in the past but it pays off more than it hurts, apart from with these cars, where it seems to bite you more than it pays off.

“I lost a big amount of speed in the straight. Not a huge amount, nothing close to what I had in Shanghai, but still I lost some time compared to my Q2 lap, which is very frustrating and something we will look at and try to understand.”

Leclerc said Ferrari has a lot of improvement to make with the optimisation of its power unit if it is to catch up to Mercedes and admitted the Maranello outfit is “just lacking raw pace compared to Mercedes and also maybe a bit McLaren.”

“In Q3 we seem to lose a little bit the optimisation of our system. Mercedes seems to be more robust with that and coming into Q3 they always find a huge amount of performance,” he added.

“If there’s anything more in the background that we don’t know, but it definitely looks like we are struggling more whenever we get to Q3, because when I push more there’s just not that much performance that is coming.”