How Hamilton could pull ultimate home upset; McLaren’s dire day laid bare: Talking Points
Hadjar crashes out in Monaco practice | 00:24 Monaco Grand Prix qualifying day is one of the best days of the Formula 1 season. It’s the most consequential qualifying hour of the year, being almost completely decisive to the race outcome .
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. The shortest, narrowest and slowest circuit in Formula 1 demands an extreme level of concentration as the cars flit between the walls, only ever millimetres from disaster.
For two hours of practice on Friday and through a final hour of preparation later today, drivers are working to find, touch but not exceed the limit, lest they spread their car over the track’s omnipresent barriers. Ferrari is clearly a step ahead after the opening day, but could there be a surprise in store from Max Verstappen — and can Mercedes or McLaren pull themselves together in time to apply any forward pressure?
Some basic Formula 1 rules hold true even at Monaco’s anachronistic layout. A good car is still indispensable, and the best drivers always come to the fore. At most circuits, low confidence can still be overcome if the car is good enough, but not here.
Drivers need all three hours of available practice to gradually shuffle closer to the barriers, to gradually push their braking zones, to incrementally get more aggressive with the throttle until they nudge up to the limit of the car. A driver who doesn’t have confidence in how their car is responding has no hope of finding that limit. On Friday, confidence was worth 0.111 seconds between session-topper Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.
“We’re facing quite a few issues on the brakes on my side,” Leclerc, the pre-weekend favourite, said. “The confidence is not at the highest level at the moment. “Apart from that, it’s a track I love, and I’m sure that if we manage to fix those for tomorrow, it will be a good step forward. Unfortunately, it’s been since Canada that I’m struggling a little bit on that.
“We’re trying to find solutions, I hope we do for tomorrow, and if so I don’t doubt that we will do a step forward. ” He also struggled with the switch from the medium to the soft tyre, whereas Hamilton looked more comfortable on the grippier rubber. It’s clear in the telemetry that the difference between the two Ferrari drivers is in some of the track’s biggest stops.
Leclerc locked up multiple times during the day at Mirabeau, and from there down to Portier he shipped around 0.25 seconds to Hamilton. In the high-speed sections of the circuit, in particular through Tabac, Leclerc was quicker, dragging back some of those losses. Just as Leclerc invoked his Montreal difficulties, Hamilton’s positive mood appeared to be on the same trajectory he set in Canada.
“The car felt quite good right from the first laps,” he said. “The team did a solid job with the changes we made between the two sessions, and we were able to work through our program without any major issues. ” It’s intriguing that Leclerc failed to string together his three fastest sectors on his fastest lap — in fact his fastest first sector came on the medium tyre.
If you were to add up his three best splits, he would have been 0.142 seconds quicker than Hamilton, who set all three of his best sectors on his fastest lap. It was worth barely a tenth of a second, but that could be the difference between pole and second place — and victory and defeat. McLaren was careful to play down expectations ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, correctly predicting that Ferrari would be the team to beat.
Nonetheless, the defending Monaco winner was confident that it could be closer to the front at a circuit that on paper should have played to some of the team’s 2026 strengths. McLaren was the slowest of the frontrunners at the end of Friday, with Oscar Piastri setting the pace for papaya at more than a second adrift of Hamilton.
Worse was that 2026 Monte Carlo winner Lando Norris couldn’t even get around to setting a quick lap after his car failed around 15 minutes into the session and had to be carted off the track. The team was even fined €30,000 , €10,000 of which was suspended, when stewards learnt that the button on the exterior of Norris’s chassis that forces the car into neutral — to allow marshals to wheel cars easily out of harm’s way when stopped on track — had been deliberately covered up with plastic tape for aerodynamic reasons.
All in all, it was a miserable day for a team that has commenced the anniversary of its 1000th grand prix start one week early.
“Not as speedy as we would like, unfortunately,” a surprised Piastri said. “A bit of a difficult one. I think we made a bit of progress for FP2, but we went from 1.5 seconds off to 1 second off, so it’s been a tough day for us for sure.
“I think we always expected Ferrari to be quick — and they look very, very quick as well — but we were hoping we would be a fair bit closer. Let’s see what we can try and muster up for tomorrow. ”“I think in today’s Formula 1 there’s never anything you can do to turn the car completely upside down.
We’ll try and find something for sure, because we need to, but I don’t have any great ideas at the moment. ” The losses aren’t everywhere, though. Almost all of Piastri’s mammoth deficit came in the first half of the to the exit of Portier, just before the tunnel.
In particular he was losing bucketloads of time to there from Mirabeau.
“Then as it went through sectors 2 and 3, we started looking a bit more competitive,” chief designer Rob Marshall said. “I think maybe that’s tyre temperature or maybe something else, but we’ve got a bit of stuff to work on certainly on the first half of the lap.
But it’s a big, big gap to close overnight, and with no real chance to make up ground through the race, McLaren is on the back foot to secure even a top-five finish, never mind a podium or back-to-back Monaco victories. Red Bull Racing flew under the radar in the build-up to Monaco.
One of the RB22’s chief weaknesses has been ride quality, which is critical to lap time in bumpy Monaco, which had it fade into the background of predictions tipping Ferrari to lead with perhaps McLaren following. The Dutchman was consistently a threat to Ferrari’s supremacy, finishing third in both Friday sessions.
Though he didn’t have the pace to disrupt either one-two classification, he’s within striking distance of the scarlet cars and ahead even of the title-leading Mercedes drivers, who were several tenths behind him on the time sheet.
“It was quite a positive day, to be honest,” Verstappen said. “We felt quite good in the car — and it is particularly important, especially around Monaco, to have a positive feeling in the car. We just need to work to fine tune a few things.
“We are happy where we are at the moment, but we are always trying to extract more from the car, so let’s see what we can do tomorrow for qualifying. ” Red Bull Racing has a tradition of making big forward steps overnight Friday, which should suggest Verstappen can at least remain thereabouts. That said, the vestiges of the RB22’s expected weakness are still evident in the telemetry.
Verstappen is a match for Hamilton in the first half of the lap but loses time through the downhill Portier and can’t recoup the losses through the busier second part of the lap with its quicker changes of directions. Certainly that seemed to catch out teammate Isack Hadjar, who crashed at the exit of the second Swimming Pool chicane in FP1 and whose 0.9-second deficit to Verstappen was mostly through that part of the track.
The second interesting question from Verstappen’s performance is whether it will be enough to stay ahead of Mercedes. The title-leading team endured a tougher day than expected, relegated to the status of third fastest and looking too far back to fight for the front row.
“We knew out of the races so far this was going to be our most challenging,” George Russell said. “It’s probably been slightly more challenging than we would have hoped. “We expected Ferrari to be the guys to beat … I think Red Bull have also been a bit of a surprise for us. “I don’t think we nailed it today, so there is room to improve, but definitely Ferrari are the team.
” Perhaps more telling, though, Andrea Kimi Antonelli appearing to tend towards overdriving the car in FP2, suggesting he felt he’d butted up against the limit of what was possible with the machinery. After the first day of running, it looks increasingly like Mercedes is set for its first grand prix defeat this season and its first major speed bump in this glittering season. Practice, though, is to some extent academic.
The pressure is at its lowest on Friday, when everyone is still incrementally exploring the limits of their machinery on dusty and slippery public roads. In FP3 the pressure ramps up because the cost for making a mistake is high, potentially ruling a driver out of qualifying if repairs are too extensive — with obviously devastating results for the race from the back of the grid. The first is track position.
With 22 cars on track in Q1, every driver will have roughly 150 metres of road each — not much at this compressed circuit. Already in practice we saw several incidents of impeding, some of which were egregious enough to warrant formal warnings. It’s not just about having a lap compromised by being too close to the car ahead.
A yellow flag at the wrong time is enough to ruin the session for multiple drivers, potentially putting them out of the session. That crucial given, for example, Sergio Pérez looks like a real Q2 threat for Cadillac if anyone were to make a mistake. Audi’s impressive double top 10 appearance will focus the pressure on the other midfield teams to avoid dropping out. On Friday we saw different teams and drivers using different strategies to warm up their tyres.
Having some drivers warming or cooling while others are on a fast lap massively complicates the traffic equation as well as how effectively a driver can get temperature into the rubber if they’re constantly having to keep out of the way. There’s no issue with running out of battery in Monte Carlo, but if the battery is at 100 per cent at the slowest parts of the track, then the hybrid part of the motor can’t be used to make up for turbo lag.
Turbo lag is the delay in power from the turbocharger when engine speed is low, reducing the exhaust gases to spin the turbine. It wasn’t a problem in previous seasons because of a specific hybrid element — the MGU-H — that was removed this season to help convince new manufacturers join the sport.
It means drivers have to be conscious of constantly deploying the battery even on, for example, the short run between Mirabeau and the hairpin, where the turbo problem is most acute — and then again out of the hairpin and on the tiny run to Portier. How many representative laps can each driver get in during FP3? Will it be enough to make up for lost time on Friday for, say, Norris or Hadjar?
Understanding how the track is evolving is crucial to predicting what the way will need in qualifying as conditions ramp up. It’s the final bit of estimation that can make or break a lap. The margins on Friday were tight. Even the smallest of differences could add up to the sport’s most important pole position.
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