Charles Leclerc has labelled Ferrari’s early-season performance “just not good enough” given the considerable delta enjoyed by front-running McLaren to the Italian team.

Heading into the 2025 F1 campaign, the expectation was that the Scuderia would again battle the Woking squad for the constructors’ championship, as it did last term.

However, Ferrari has been well short of the required level over the year’s opening two rounds. After a dismal weekend in Australia, it suffered mixed fortunes at the Chinese Grand Prix.

The general sentiment has been that the performance is there with the SF-25, but it is just a case of the team extracting that pace for Leclerc and new team-mate Lewis Hamilton to utilise. Although, the Monegasque driver has been quick to disavow such reports.

“It’s as difficult as always,” Leclerc told media including RacingNews365. “It’s always tricky to extract the maximum.

“I don’t think it’s harder this season – it’s just the performance compared to McLaren is just not good enough.

“It’s not about extracting the performance – it’s just that there isn’t enough of it for now. But step by step, I’m sure and confident we can close that gap, starting from this weekend hopefully.”

Despite stating he is hopeful the Italian team can make progress over the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, Leclerc expects a similar level of performance to the subsequent rounds, suggesting Hamilton’s sprint victory in Shanghai was an outlier.

“We saw a big step on Saturday – especially in the Sprint race with Lewis,” he explained. “On Sunday, I think it was back to normal. So I expect us to be more or less in line with where we were in China on Sunday and in Melbourne.”

Leclerc: ‘It hurts the team a lot’

With two rounds of 24 complete, Ferrari already trails McLaren by 61 points. Even if Leclerc and Hamilton had not been disqualified from fifth and sixth place respectively in China, the deficit would still be 43.

It was an unexpected sting in the tail over the weekend in Shanghai, adding further disappointment to a race that promised so much and delivered so little after Hamilton’s sprint win suggested the team had corrected its Melbourne woes.

The two Ferraris were found foul of the rulebook for differing reasons, but Leclerc is not worried about repeat offences further plaguing the team.

“I’m confident because whenever you make mistakes, you learn from them, especially when they cost that much,” the eight-time grand prix winner said.

“Everybody plays with the limit and tries to be as close as possible to it. But to have both cars underneath it was a big pain. We didn’t need that.”

Reiterating the Scuderia’s poor start to the year, the 27-year-old underlined how much the first two rounds have hurt the team.

“It’s been a very difficult first part of the season,” he added. “The first two races were difficult, the pace was not where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, it hurts the team a lot.

“I’m confident we’ve learned from it. Whenever these kind of events happen we try to understand and analyse what went wrong and change a little bit the process. It was a multitude of things adding up, and the margin we took wasn’t big enough.”