Ferrari’s much-anticipated homecoming at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix has turned into a weekend of disappointment, with both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton failing to qualify in the top ten at Imola. In front of thousands of passionate tifosi, Ferrari could only muster 11th and 12th on the grid — a stark contrast to the pole position secured by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.
The Imola circuit, just 50 miles from Ferrari’s Maranello headquarters, holds deep emotional significance for the team. But Saturday’s qualifying session was a bitter pill to swallow.
“Very disappointed, especially at home at such a special grand prix for the team,” said Leclerc, visibly frustrated after stepping out of the car. “It hurts. It would have hurt anyway at whatever track, but here it hurts even more.”
Leclerc’s final flying lap was nearly a second adrift of Piastri’s pole time, and he was clearly disillusioned with Ferrari’s performance: “I have no words about our performance today. The only thing we can say is that we are sorry for this kind of performance at home. We are just not good enough at the moment.”
Hamilton, meanwhile, who is still settling into his first season with Ferrari, echoed Leclerc’s disappointment. Although the seven-time world champion said the car had felt good throughout practice, the pace simply wasn’t there when it mattered most.
“I feel gutted, I guess,” Hamilton said after qualifying. “The car was generally feeling really good. The set-up felt right, the brakes were working, everything was kind of in place. And we just can’t go quicker.”
Hamilton trailed Leclerc by just over a tenth of a second, but his frustrations lay in the team’s inability to extract performance from fresh soft tyres — a recurring issue that first surfaced at the Miami Grand Prix.
“When we put that new soft tyre on at the end, for some reason it just didn’t come alive. There was no extra grip,” Hamilton added.
In contrast, the Red Bulls and McLarens continued to show strong form, with Max Verstappen and Piastri finding significant gains in the final runs. “If you look at how quick Max is going through Turn Two and Three, we just can’t match it,” Hamilton lamented. “We’re talking about six to ten kph more speed — it’s night and day.”
Ferrari’s lacklustre qualifying means they face an uphill battle in Sunday’s race, where overtaking opportunities at Imola are notoriously limited. The team currently sits fourth in the constructors’ standings, 152 points adrift of leaders McLaren, with Leclerc fifth and Hamilton seventh in the drivers’ championship.
Despite the underwhelming results, Hamilton remained committed to the long-term project at Ferrari. “This is a foundation-building year,” he said. “There’s a lot of improvements we can make across the board, as well as obviously building a faster car. I have all the faith and belief we can do that.”
Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur is now under pressure to deliver upgrades that can bring the Scuderia back into contention — and fast. As the European leg of the season kicks off, the gap to the front-runners is growing increasingly difficult to ignore.
For now, the dream of delivering a memorable performance at home has slipped through Ferrari’s fingers. The tifosi can only hope that better days lie ahead — and that their beloved team won’t spend the rest of the season languishing in “P-nowhere.”
