Charles Leclerc topped final practice at the Monaco Grand Prix with foreboding ease ahead of the most consequential qualifying session of the season.
Leclerc set the pre-qualifying benchmark at 1m11.369s with around 15 minutes still to run in FP3, a time that gave him a margin of more than half a second over the rest of the field until the final minutes of the hour despite a mistake in the final sector.
It took until the last five minutes for Max Verstappen to chip away at the margin and close to 0.197s of the Monaco native, but by then the comparison had become unrepresentative, the track having improved markedly with the extensive soft-tire running conducted by every team.
It was a taxing effort for the Dutchman, too, who had to wring the neck of his recalcitrant RB20 just to get to within touching distance.
“If I do more laps like that, I’ll end up in the fence,” he radioed his team.
Red Bull Racing is battling what appears to be a fundamental mismatch between its car and the street circuit, and earlier in the session Verstappen suggested that inherent issue remained at large.
“I know where we can gain time,” he said. “It’s just not possible. We know why.”
Verstappen will also face a post-session investigation for driving unnecessarily slowly in an encounter with heavy traffic that spoiled one of his flying laps late in the hour.
Teammate Sergio Perez, who finished fifth and 0.554s off the pace, was more blunt in his assessment.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said. “The car is nowhere.”
Lewis Hamilton continued his good form in Monte Carlo to lap 0.341s off the pace, while Oscar Piastri impressed for McLaren in fourth and 0.532s adrift of Leclerc’s headline time.
