Why Briatore is wrong about Raikkonen's final Ferrari chapter

Charles Leclerc's journey to Ferrari stardom is different to, say, Max Verstappen's rapid rise to fame with Red Bull.

Red Bull is a team that that eschews the traditional and conservative approach when it comes to driver choices. Ferrari, famously, goes the other way, and yet for the start of last season it still hired the 20-year-old Leclerc to replace the 38-year-old, five-season incumbent, Kimi Raikkonen - the team's most recent world champion.

It might seem odd to be discussing a development that is over a year old - and it's 18 months since Leclerc's deal to join Ferrari from what was then called Sauber was announced - but the debate around the timing of his promotion has been thrust back into the spotlight by former Benetton/Renault team boss Flavio Briatore.

"Leclerc is young - [he has] big balls, because he's demonstrating [that]," Briatore told F1's Beyond the Grid podcast this week.

"I believe if I was at Ferrari, I would have put Leclerc already two years ago to replace Raikkonen, because, you know, with Raikkonen you are going nowhere. You'll never win nothing [anything] with him.

"You know at the time I would take the risk and put Leclerc [in the car]. Leclerc is a really, really strong guy."

A promotion to Ferrari for the 2018 season would have meant jumping into one of the highest-profile seats on the grid as a rookie, even if Leclerc had proved his worth by surging to back-to-back GP3 and Formula 2 championships in the F1 support categories over the previous two years.

But such a move would have been wrong, and here's why.

For a start, and yes this is a less dramatic take, Leclerc needed that year with Sauber. It's well established that for most F1 drivers, starting in a car slightly further down the grid lets them get their mistakes out of the way while not in the spotlight. For every Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen - who completed 23 races for Toro Rosso before joining Red Bull and winning on his debut in Barcelona - there's Daniil Kvyat and Pierre Gasly, even Romain Grosjean's first stint in F1 with Renault. Some promotions simply come too soon.

Leclerc's F1 career was always going to come with added scrutiny given his junior category success and long-established Ferrari links. So, it's worth recalling that when he did make mistakes early-on in 2018 - spinning in qualifying in Bahrain, spinning in the race in China - there were those who questioned whether the excitement around his potential was justified.

Leclerc was an improved driver when he got his promotion and Ferrari is now all the better for it

Of course, starting with his sixth place in Baku that year, he ultimately answered those critics emphatically. But, nevertheless, if Leclerc had made those errors in a Ferrari that Raikkonen took to second on the grid in both Bahrain and China, the scrutiny would have been on an altogether different level.

That's not to say things wouldn't have panned out in the same way even if Leclerc had started his F1 career in a front-running car.

After all, this was a driver who the previous year had done what no rookie F2 racer had done in nearly a decade, and won the top F1 support category at the first attempt. He also did so in a year when he had to cope with the death of his father, winning the F2 feature race in Baku (and only losing the sprint event to a yellow-flag infringement penalty) just days after that tragic development. Even if you know the story well, it's worth reflecting on.

Leclerc is a determined and focussed character. So, in that sense, yes, Briatore is right that if Ferrari had decided to put the "really strong guy" in its line-up for 2018 it would have gained an undoubted asset - but the risk of damaging his confidence or reputation early on was simply too great.

When he did arrive at the Scuderia a year later, he qualified on pole and should have won his second race - had a cylinder failure not cruelly robbed him in Bahrain. He was an improved driver and Ferrari is now all the better for it.

But Briatore is also wrong when it comes to Raikkonen in 2018 - because a Ferrari driver surely should have won that season, even it if it wasn't to be the Finn.

Briatore has the benefit of hindsight - as does this column, it must be said - when making his assessments in 2020. Overall, Raikkonen's second stint with Ferrari was very underwhelming, but the team spent all of that time operating as it had done for so long before.

This was with an established number one in all but name (for 2014 this was Fernando Alonso, and from 2015-2018, Sebastian Vettel) alongside another strong driver who might not have been expect to bring in the biggest of results - if the 'lead' driver was delivering.

And that's what Raikkonen did in 2018 - he produced as was expected. He scored best results of his second spell at Ferrari, with 11 podiums, pole at Monza and a well-executed win at Austin. He was even hard done by on occasion - particularly in Australia where he looked to be the faster Ferrari driver, but was beaten by Vettel (who went on to win) thanks to the virtual safety car interruption. Then, in Italy, Vettel's spin exposed Raikkonen to Hamilton's harassment, which cooked his tyres and lost Ferrari the win when it had started 1-2.

The real reason Ferrari wasted a year "going nowhere", per Briatore, was surely down to Vettel's run of mistakes that cost him in the title fight against Hamilton.

Yes, of course there is always the potential for a younger, faster team-mate to elevate an established driver and push them onto the next level, but that is never guaranteed - particularly when that the newcomer is a rookie.

In some cases, it can even have the opposite effect, as shown by McLaren's 2007 season when it fielded Alonso and Hamilton together during the latter's first year in F1, and both were beaten at the last by Raikkonen.

While Vettel had done well to win in Bahrain, after his Australian good fortune, Canada and Britain, his spiral after crashing out in the rain at his home race in Germany was dramatic. Alongside Hamilton's brilliance, it was one of the two main storylines of 2018.

Apart from a spirited win in Belgium there was error after error in the title run-in, with his spin at Austin coming on the weekend when Raikkonen finally ended his win drought. Vettel should have at least made it a closer fight that year, but he failed.

And yet it is intriguing to think what would have happened to Ferrari's driver line-up had Vettel triumphed in 2018. It's just possible that with proof that it's tried and tested method had finally produced a title, then the team would have persevered with the Vettel/Raikkonen combination.

But the real life timeline - with Raikkonen's Ferrari exit confirmed just before Leclerc's promotion was announced, and it later emerging he had been told of the decision ahead of the Italian GP - suggests that the team was considering making the change for some time.

Indeed, Vettel's run of errors followed that Monza weekend, and there were suggestions that Ferrari wanted to honour the plan to promote Leclerc that had apparently been implemented by Sergio Marchionne before he died in July 2018.

Perhaps Briatore's comments and wider frustration from fans eager to see Mercedes' run of domination come to an end stem from that desire just to see someone, anyone, else win. That is after all where Vettel and Ferrari overall have consistently come up short.