According to Motorsport.com Italia, Ferrari walked away from the Circuit of the Americas with plenty of positives yet a lingering sense of what could have been. Charles Leclerc brought home a second-place finish, and Lewis Hamilton confirmed the squad's ongoing progress, helping consolidate second place in the constructors' standings. But the overarching feeling inside the garage was that a potential victory slipped right through their fingers during the decisive moments of qualifying.
Fred Vasseur pointed directly to the final two laps of Q3 as the root of the missed opportunity. Up until that point, the machinery had looked formidable across all practice sessions. However, minor execution errors when trying to drop the tires into their ideal temperature window proved costly. With the top teams separated by razor-thin margins, dropping just two or three tenths can dump a driver all the way from second to sixth on the grid. Starting from fourth and fifth forced the team onto the back foot, requiring an aggressive strategy caught between a one-stop and a two-stop approach.
Leclerc made his intentions known right from the start with a brilliant opening-lap move on Max Verstappen. Running a two-stop strategy, the Monegasque driver charged hard and even entertained hopes of an outright win when Kimi Antonelli attempted a single stop. Ultimately, the hard compound proved rapid, but the gap was too much to bridge. Leclerc admitted he lost valuable time duelling with Max and Lando, though he conceded that clean air alone might not have been enough to catch Antonelli on this day.
Lewis Hamilton faced a separate battle with handling woes during the early stints of the race. Having taken a wrong setup direction on Friday, Hamilton struggled with heavy understeer and an inability to rotate the car properly. The team worked frantically during pit stops, adding multiple rounds of front wing adjustments to tame the beast. Once the balance finally came alive in the final stint, Hamilton's pace matched the frontrunners, leaving him to wonder what a clean start to the weekend might have yielded.
The broader picture for Maranello remains remarkably bright. The SF-26 has shown consistent performance across different conditions, proving that its speed is no longer track-specific. Leclerc noted personal strides in unlocking the car's potential through driving style and setup harmony, while Vasseur emphasized that the team is scoring heavily for the third or fourth consecutive weekend. It is a solid foundation, even if Austin will be remembered as the weekend they had the machine to win, but left the door open on Saturday.
