Trundling round on the periphery of the point scorers, Charles Leclerc entertained himself by working out the various championship permutations.

On a Sprint weekend, when a team can pick up as many as 58 points, Ferrari left Qatar with just 4... it was that bad.

Losing out at the start to Nico Hulkenberg, Leclerc made up a couple of places when the German clashed with Pierre Gasly in an incident which turned the race on its head, certainly for McLaren. The Monegasque was fortunate again later in the race when he benefitted from Isack Hadjar's puncture.

For much of the evening however, like his teammate Lewis Hamilton, he simply trundled around waiting for the chequered flag.

"It's been a very boring weekend for me," he admitted at race end, "but I could follow (the race) on the screen a little bit was trying to do the math in my head. That was the most exciting part of my race, apart from that it was very boring.

"I had no confidence in the car," he continued. "I had no pace in the car. I had nothing in the car. I'm quite glad the weekend is over to be honest. It was a very frustrating race from the very first lap to the very last lap.

"Again, after what happened yesterday in the first lap I had no confidence and I didn't know what was going to happen with the car in the first few laps. There's not been one lap where we've been competitive over the weekend, so it's been very frustrating."

Asked if it had been difficult to remain on the black stuff, he admitted: "Yeah, but not only in the race. In the race maybe a tiny bit easier, but the pace was not there. But in qualifying it was unbelievably difficult."

Asked if he is happy that the season is almost over, he said: "On one hand yes, but at the same time, I'm just really looking forward to Abu Dhabi and trying to finish the season on a more positive note and hoping to give us a little bit more happiness to go on holiday, because it will be quite depressing to go on holiday with two weekends just like this weekend. That would be very bad, so I hope we can have a better weekend.

"I want to get it out of the way," he continued, "but I want to get it out of the way in a positive way. I want to do absolutely everything in order to extract whatever is left of our car and hopefully jump on the podium one last time this year.

"Targeting a win would be quite unrealistic, but yeah, a podium, I really hope so. But, to be honest, after a weekend like that, I have very little hope."

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