"Undriveable" in Brazil, Worried About Vegas: Leclerc Warns Ferrari's Tyre Nightmare Isn't Over

Charles Leclerc did not try to dress it up. Ferrari's São Paulo Grand Prix was poor, the car was almost impossible to manage in the opening stint, and the worst of it might be yet to come.

Leclerc finished eighth at Interlagos on Sunday, a result that looks respectable only until you look at how he got there. A power-unit penalty had dropped him to 14th on the grid, and from there he spent the race fighting a car that would not do what he asked of it. The problem was temperature, or rather the lack of it. Ferrari could not generate heat in the tyres, and in the first stint the car was, in Leclerc's telling, barely driveable. He climbed to eighth through grit and attrition, but eighth was the ceiling, not the floor.

"We need to look forward. First, we need to analyse this performance, which was poor, and then we'll see about Las Vegas, which I think could be difficult for us because of the low temperatures," Leclerc told reporters after the race, including Grande Prêmio. It was the second half of that sentence that will worry Ferrari most. Las Vegas, the next stop on the calendar from November 19 to 21, is a night race in the desert, and its cold evening conditions could reproduce exactly the tyre warm-up problems that ruined Ferrari's weekend in Brazil.

The contrast with the rest of the field could hardly have been starker. Lando Norris won the rain-hit race from pole for McLaren, his second straight victory in Brazil, while Max Verstappen charged from 21st on the grid to second and Isack Hadjar took third. Behind them, George Russell and Kimi Antonelli brought their Mercedes home fourth and fifth, results that were enough to seal the constructors' championship for Mercedes, its ninth title and its first since 2021. Ferrari, meanwhile, left Interlagos with Leclerc eighth and more questions than answers.

The timing could hardly be worse. There are only three races left in the season, and Ferrari now has a break before Las Vegas to analyse what went wrong at Interlagos and work out whether setup changes can fix it. The team will need to find something. Las Vegas presents a different circuit configuration, but its cool evening conditions could again make tyre preparation the deciding factor, and a car that cannot switch its tyres on will be just as lost on the Strip as it was in São Paulo.

Leclerc, for his part, declined to answer a question about racing in the Middle East, where the final two rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain clouded by uncertainty. He had enough on his mind already. A season that began with Ferrari hoping to fight for the title is ending with its lead driver warning that the next race could be just as difficult as the last one. The car is fast when the tyres work. When they don't, as Interlagos proved, it is barely a racing car at all. And in the cold of a Las Vegas night, that is a problem Ferrari has less than two weeks to solve.