Charles Leclerc waves the white flag for Ferrari after Qatar GP qualifying: "There's zero performance in the car"

Charles Leclerc minced no words about Ferrari's severe lack of performance after the Qatar Grand Prix qualifying on Saturday. Both Scuderia drivers have been fighting their SF-25s since day one of the race weekend at the Lusail International Circuit.

Lewis Hamilton has fared the worst of the two, with two consecutive Q1 knockouts. In Sprint qualifying on Friday, the seven-time F1 champion was knocked out in SQ1 in P18, and unfortunately, he secured the same position in the feature qualifying session on Saturday.

Charles Leclerc also struggled with the same issue with the Ferrari car, losing its rear-end on nearly every run. Though he fared better than his teammate and qualified in P10 for the 57-lap race on Sunday, the Monegasque had no positives to carry over after the session.

Leclerc was visibly downbeat during the post-qualifying interviews. Assessing his weekend so far, he said (via F1TV):

"Incredibly difficult day, incredibly difficult weekend. I don't really know what to say. It's been extremely difficult to drive this car, to keep it on track. I'm trying absolutely everything to extract anything from that car, but at the moment, that's the only thing possible for now. It's frustrating."

"The best thing I can do is to reset for tomorrow and try to come back to the track motivated and try to do something special. Am I optimistic for tomorrow? I am not, which is quite rare. I'm a very optimistic person. But I have to say, this weekend, there's zero performance in this car."

Charles Leclerc was pushing his SF-25 very hard to extract the maximum performance from the 'broken' car, as Alex Brundle described it. While doing so, he had a scary double spin in Q3. The Monegasque emerged as the slowest driver in Q3, beaten also by the Alpine of Pierre Gasly and the Williams of Carlos Sainz.

Charles Leclerc feels Ferrari has no scope for improvement for the Qatar GP

F1 Grand Prix of Qatar - Sprint & Qualifying - Source: Getty

Charles Leclerc highlighted that the only hope he has of improving his position in the Qatar GP on Sunday lies in the hands of fate. Nothing from the Sprint Race nor the qualifying runs on Saturday made the Monegasque believe that Ferrari's challenger had any scope for improvement for the race on Sunday.

The only event he rests his Qatar GP fate on is a safety car intervention during the race that plays into his hands.

"Nothing that I felt with this car made me think that I will have a better feeling tomorrow," said Leclerc. "So yeah, I'll wait and try to maximize what is possible tomorrow. Hopefully, with safety cars, we can get a little bit lucky, and that's probably my only hope."

With Charles Leclerc starting P10 and Lewis Hamilton in P18, Ferrari, which is P4 in the constructors' championship, can seemingly bid goodbye to their hopes of securing second place in the standings. The current second-placed team, Mercedes, is already 63 points ahead, and the one-man Red Bull team is in third, 22 points ahead of Ferrari.