Formula 1 Barcelona-Catalunya Pre-Season Testing

How Ferrari’s Barcelona F1 test is going so far, according to Charles Leclerc

Ferrari kickstarted its Barcelona week on Tuesday, and everything is going to plan, Leclerc reports

Charles Leclerc says “everything went properly” during Ferrari’s first morning of 2026 Formula 1 testing at Barcelona.

As F1 moves into a new technical era with new chassis and engine regulations, the world championship is having a five-day test behind closed doors at the Catalan track this week, though teams can run on only three days each.

Ferrari unveiled its new SF-26 on Friday in Fiorano, where it held a 15km shakedown meeting the Demonstration Event regulations, then opted to skip the first day of the Barcelona test.

This means the Scuderia’s first meaningful running with its new machinery occurred this morning with Leclerc at the wheel, though it was impacted by rain from around 10:40am local time.

“For now it's all about trying to understand if everything is working properly, which it kind of did,” the Monegasque said. “It's not the best conditions because it's been a little bit raining this morning, but actually we did our programme anyway, because again, we're not focused on performance or whatsoever. We're more about looking at all the systems that are new on this car and see if everything works as it should. And it did, so that's a positive.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

Pressed on the key takeaways of the morning, Leclerc played the early running down: “Obviously, being the first morning, we've gone through the very first preliminary check of the car, which everything went properly.”

Lewis Hamilton took over at the wheel of the Ferrari for the afternoon, with Leclerc’s race engineer Bryan Bozzi reported by Sky Italia to take on that role provisionally with the seven-time world champion too.

Hamilton’s previous race engineer Riccardo Adami was moved aside to the Ferrari Driver Academy and the Testing of Previous Cars programme, due to a clear lack of chemistry between the pair.

“Little by little we'll just go through our checklist of the first systems to then eventually what matters most, which is performance,” Leclerc added. “But this will come probably a bit later on in those three days and trying to understand first how everything behaves and then see how it goes.”

The Monegasque insisted that it was “very, very, very early” to weigh in on F1 cars’ new tools such as active aerodynamics and energy boosts, with the morning “all about doing a proper system check on a track”, though he agreed managing those new concepts would be “a bit more of a challenge”.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

As far as his ambitions for 2026 are concerned, the eight-time grand prix winner remained unsurprisingly cautious given how unpredictable the pecking order is amid a regulatory overhaul.

“This year is a big opportunity for every team to do something different and to maybe gain a bigger advantage than what we've seen in the last few years,” Leclerc said. “I hope we are the team that will manage to make the difference. But wherever we start, we will push at the maximum to try and bring Ferrari back to the top. It's been quite a few years, so I hope that this one is ours.”

Ferrari’s last world title was its 2008 constructors’ crown in 2008, with Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen.