Is it time for Leclerc to look elsewhere?

Three days before the United States Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc celebrated his 28th birthday. When he was born on 16 October 1997, Elton John was enjoying his fifth and final week atop the UK singles chart with the AA-side Something About The Way You Look/Candle In The Wind ’97, imminently to be deposed by the Spice Girls with Spice Up Your Life.

This is a roundabout, perhaps even overly abstruse, way of expressing an unfortunate fact: Leclerc is no longer the keen young rookie who rocketed onto the Formula 1 scene in 2018 with Alfa Romeo, effectively ending Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari career by earning promotion to Maranello for the following year, where he did the same favour for Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion.

He is two years away from turning 30 and the inevitable point where one is considered an elder statesman of F1, or at least a seasoned veteran.

He has won eight grands prix for Ferrari, an average rate of slightly more than one a year. Leclerc’s talent deserves more than this. Much as the team and its loyal tifosi love the Monegasque, and the feeling is clearly mutual, the fact remains that he is investing his years of peak performance in a team that has failed to give him a car worthy of winning world championships.

His recent pronouncements have remained outwardly faithful to the project, while cut through with a note of – disillusionment? Or just fraying patience?

“I’ve always loved Ferrari,” he said during the Azerbaijan weekend, “and that’s where I draw my motivation from – because I want to bring back Ferrari to the top no matter how long it takes.

“And I’ll do absolutely everything until I stop believing in the project. But at the moment I’m fully into it, I’m fully working on it and that’s what motivates me.

“Of course that doesn’t erase the disappointment that I’ve had at the beginning of the season when I saw we were quite a few steps behind McLaren, but then you reset and you find your motivation in other goals, in other targets, which is now to hopefully get a win this year. 

The Monegasque scored his maiden grand prix victory at Spa in 2019

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“It’s underwhelming compared with where we wanted to be, but it’s the situation we’re in. And as a driver, I’ve got to make the best out of this situation, not only for the team but also for myself – and I’m very competitive as well so the fact that we’ve got two cars is also something that pushes me to keep being at the top of my game and to keep improving.

“So on that I really don’t lack any motivation – I mean I’m super-motivated but, as I said, of course the disappointment was there at the beginning of the season.”

The rumour mill

In 2023 there were rumours that Leclerc was in talks with Mercedes, prompting angry denials from all parties concerned, including Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur. Whether or not there was any contact – and it could easily have been a case of silly season media speculation, or a negotiating tactic as Mercedes boss Toto Wolff wrangled with Lewis Hamilton – nothing came of it.

But the Italian media has ever been a thorn in the side of Ferrari drivers and bosses; this summer, La Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera began to take aim at Vasseur himself, alongside new technical director Loic Serra.

On top of that, Leclerc became the object of rumours once more as Mercedes delayed re-signing both George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

“They said Charles will go to Mercedes. It was the same article the last five, six races and Charles each Thursday is coming back to say, ‘Guys, it’s not true. I’m at Ferrari. I want to stay’” Fred Vasseur

In a season largely dominated by McLaren on track, with the ongoing soap opera at Red Bull lingering in the background, there was a lull in the day-to-day narrative that some online outlets chose to fill with speculation that Leclerc might go to Mercedes. These drums beat louder once it became clear that Verstappen was going to remain at Red Bull.

“When I signed at Ferrari I knew about this,” said Vasseur during an appearance on the official F1 podcast. “I knew I would be exposed to the gossips, to the rumours, to this kind of polemic. But in the same article we had two other topics.

“The first one was, ‘Ah perhaps Loic [Serra] is not the right guy for the job’. Loic arrived after the car [design for 2025 was finalised] and I was a bit upset that you can throw a name like this under the bus just to create the polemic with absolute nonsense. The second point was about Charles.

Battling Verstappen for the lead at the start of the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“They said Charles will go to Mercedes. It was the same article the last five, six races and Charles each Thursday is coming back to say, ‘Guys, it’s not true. I’m at Ferrari. I want to stay.’ At one stage I think this article is more to create a mess than something else.

“And it’s where I say, ‘Guys, please calm down’. I’m not asking the press to be positive with Ferrari when we’re not doing well. You can have a negative judgement but just to – I don’t want to say the word [bulls***] because I don’t want to have to go to the stewards – but to spread this on the team each weekend, please calm down. Be negative when we are doing a poor job on track but don’t spread rumours like this.”

Should he stay or should he go?

Leclerc has been part of the Ferrari picture for so long, and is so beloved by the team and its fans, that it’s difficult to see him willingly walk away. His spectacular, committed style has earned comparisons with Ferrari legend Gilles Villeneuve and rightly so.

Besides his sheer bravura and exuberance at the wheel, Leclerc shares with Villeneuve an honesty and sense of honour. He can be brutally excoriating about his own mistakes and chafes openly if he thinks a team-mate has been duplicitous, most recently in Azerbaijan when he obeyed an order to let team-mate Hamilton past to attack Lando Norris, but Hamilton did not reciprocate when asked to hand the place back on the final lap.

Leclerc also shares with Villeneuve a romantic attachment to Ferrari and its almost mythological status. But Formula 1 is a brutal business, which can break up even the cosiest relationships. The inhabitants of this ecosystem are ultra-competitive individuals whose tolerance for failure is finite.

Let us not forget that even though Villeneuve was Ferrari’s darling, he was sorely tested and had told close friends that he was considering leaving at the end of the 1982 season. McLaren had already made him an offer before he met his maker at Zolder.

The long period of dominance by Mercedes from the dawn of the hybrid era, followed by another streak in which Red Bull seemed unassailable, mean that people with short memories tend to overlook the historic precedent that F1 is a category where competitiveness waxes and wanes.

Often the best a driver can hope for is to be in the right place at the right time, and stay there. It is hard to predict when competitiveness will fall off, for it doesn’t always happen around a major rule change, as evinced by Red Bull’s woes of the past 18 months.

Tricky-to-handle SF-23 put Leclerc in the barriers during 2023 Miami qualifying

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

That makes moving teams perilous. Fernando Alonso, for instance, threw over Renault for McLaren after two seasons of sustained championship-winning success. This and every career move he has made since, failed to keep him in the right place to enjoy that same consistently high level of results.

Ferrari was a byword for dominance when Jean Todt was team principal, acting as a firewall for the staff against the excesses of the Italian media and supported to the hilt by president Luca di Montezemolo.

But it was unable to sustain the momentum, even though Todt and technical director Ross Brawn tried to leave their affairs in order when they decided to move on. Raikkonen was an outsider for the 2007 drivers’ championship, aided in his campaign by McLaren’s self-destruction, but for Ferrari it has been a case of close-but-no-cigar ever since – attended by a revolving door of senior management as the old habits of internal politics set in again in Maranello.

And, lo, what had seemed to be a relationship of mutual admiration between team and driver dissolved into rancour

In 2014, no fewer than three people held the office of team principal, one of whom – Stefano Domenicali – was effectively forced out because he refused to scapegoat-fire the head of the engine department.

That was the year Alonso decided he’d had enough, after coming near, but not quite near enough, to winning the title in 2010 and 2012. Diminishing returns had set in after that. Later in the decade, a few rounds of hirings and firings later, there were signs of a reboot under Mattia Binotto, and Vettel looked like he might have a chance in 2017… only to self-destruct along with his car’s reliability.

And, lo, as with Alonso, what had seemed to be a relationship of mutual admiration between team and driver dissolved into rancour.

History repeating

Leclerc’s tenure at Ferrari began during what seemed to be an uptick in performance, but already there were mutterings in the wider F1 firmament about the contents of the engine bay. It was known that Ferrari had successfully introduced the so-called turbulent jet ignition technology, in which a secondary chamber containing a richer fuel mix than the primary chamber is used to create the initial burn.

There was nothing illegal in this – it simply enabled higher compression ratios and leaner fuel mixes – and rivals naturally rushed to copy. 

Victory from pole in Australia (plus Bahrain) in 2022 proved to be a false dawn

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

During 2019 there was more innuendo, this time claiming Ferrari was circumventing the fuel-flow sensor. Nothing was proved, openly at least, but at the beginning of 2020 the FIA announced it had reached a “confidential settlement” with Ferrari. When the season finally got going after the COVID delay, Ferrari had a shocker.

There was another flash of promise at the beginning of the new ground-effect era in 2022 when Leclerc won from pole position in Bahrain and Australia. But Ferrari slipped back relative to Red Bull as the year wore on and Leclerc finished a distant second.

Since then, there has been more instability at senior level as leading engineers David Sanchez and Enrico Cardile departed, and Ferrari has continued to struggle with in-season development.

Through 2023 and early 2024 the majority of upgrade packages failed to yield the anticipated effects. The cars were edgy and unpredictable to drive, which Leclerc could live with – just about – but team-mate Carlos Sainz disliked. But tuning the car more to Sainz’s liking seemed to make it harder for Leclerc to extract the maximum.

It looked like Ferrari had made a breakthrough in the summer of 2024 when it shut down its wind tunnel and replaced the rolling road with a belt material that more closely resembled actual asphalt. The current generation of ground-effect cars runs at such low ride heights that such details are increasingly critical.

Further development turned the SF-24 into one of the most competitive cars on the grid, enabling Leclerc to add wins in Italy and the USA to his victory in Monaco earlier that season.

Hopes were therefore high ahead of this year, where he was to be joined by Hamilton. It’s fair to say the season hasn’t panned out as expected. Instead of a pitched battle for supremacy between two greats, the narrative has been one of continuous frustration.

Even the Chinese GP weekend, where Hamilton won the sprint race, was ruined by both Ferraris being disqualified – Hamilton for excess plank wear, Leclerc for the car being underweight. It was a grotesquely public episode of sloppy execution.

Leclerc best of the rest behind the McLarens in July’s Belgian Grand Prix

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

For the remainder of the season there has been a suspicion that Ferrari is having to compromise its set-ups to avoid plank wear because the SF-25 only achieves peak performance at very low ride heights.

The Hungaroring was a case in point, where Leclerc qualified on pole but his pace abruptly fell off on his last set of tyres. Russell, following in his Mercedes, speculated that Ferrari had upped the rear-tyre pressures to protect the plank. Ferrari tried to wave off this theory but it remains plausible. All of this in spite of switching to a new rear suspension geometry at Spa.

So, having expected to challenge for the world championship, Ferrari and its drivers have once again had to reset their expectations. Now the hope is to win a grand prix before season’s end – a far more modest goal.

“I think as a team it’s just a matter of not really hearing the noise around the team, but just be focused on our own thing” Charles Leclerc

“I’m not sure what the future holds but I’m pretty sure that Ferrari will hold its history and its iconic status, which comes obviously with a lot of hype, a lot of expectations, and it’s up to us to manage it in a better way,” said Leclerc in Baku. 

“I don’t think that this should be in any way an excuse for not performing. Ferrari has had so much success and it’s not like when they’ve had that success they didn’t have the hype that came with it. 

“I think as a team it’s just a matter of not really hearing the noise around the team, but just be focused on our own thing – and this is what I’ve been doing since I started with the team. Obviously in 2019 it was a little bit more difficult because I was young, everything was new – I mean, I’m still young but… there was also a lot of hype about me being in red for my second year in Formula 1. 

“But since then it’s important to do a step back and to not always react on emotions and on what’s being said around us. I think it’s very important to just stay focused.  And on that I think we are doing a good job – but not good enough, because we must be back winning soon.”

Leclerc’s most recent victory was at last year’s United States Grand Prix

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The heir to Villeneuve?

Although it was by no means inevitable that Ferrari would be Charles Leclerc’s Formula 1 destination, the possibility was in the air from the moment he signed on with Nicolas Todt’s All Road Management in 2011.

Todt had – and continues to enjoy – strong links with the team on account of his father Jean having overseen its most recent period of sustained success in the early 2000s. Nicolas was managing Felipe Massa and Leclerc’s godfather Jules Bianchi at the time, both of whom were in the Ferrari ecosystem.

Todt Jr’s partnership with future Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur in the ART Grand Prix team made him an influential conduit of young talent, and he continues to be so: Martinius Stenshorne, another driver on the ARM books, is a member of McLaren’s junior programme and stepped up to F2 in Baku.

Todt secured Leclerc a place on Ferrari’s young-driver scheme, and by the time he reached F2 it was obvious he was destined for greatness.

Shortly after his ‘soft launch’ into F1 via Alfa Romeo-sponsored Sauber (the Alfa brand at the time shared ownership with Ferrari, before the Prancing Horse was spun off separately and the rest of the Fiat marques merged into the Stellantis empire), GP Racing arranged an interview and photo shoot with him, after which photographer Glenn Dunbar murmured to this author: “That boy’s going to be a winner. He’s got the killer instinct. You can see it in his eyes…”

That sentiment was confirmed a year later when Leclerc took his maiden win in Belgium, then another at Monza, Ferrari’s first victory on home soil in nine years. The tifosi entered a state of rapture. So too did the grandees of the Ferrari empire.

Vice-chairman Piero Lardi Ferrari has seldom been one to embrace the limelight, though it is difficult to avoid these days when the presence of anyone remotely well-known in a garage is to invite the F1 TV cameras to zoom in.

His preference for letting the likes of Luca di Montezemolo and Sergio Marchionne do the talking persists to this day, where he quietly lets CEO Benedetto Vigna and chairman John Elkann act as front men even though it was his father who founded the company.

Villeneuve’s legendary derring-do finds echoes in the tifosi’s current darling

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

So when he does talk in public, his sentiments carry resonance. And on Leclerc he has been unequivocal.

“Charles is a driver who would have been very much to my father’s taste,” he said in 2021. “An intelligent fellow, gifted with incredible talent in every respect, highly concentrated. If we give him the right car, he will give us a lot of pleasure.”

Mattia Binotto, team principal at the time, put Ferrari’s words in context. “The one that Enzo Ferrari liked the most was Gilles Villeneuve,” he said. “In his way of driving, he was always very spontaneous and fresh.

“He gave everything he had to deliver the most, and was crazy enough and capable of doing outstanding qualifying laps. And so he is one of these drivers that create the passion in the tifosi. Because he was really doing his best always.”

You could almost taste his frustration in the Hungarian GP this year when, after qualifying on pole, he slipped back in the latter stages of the race

Those comparisons might have seemed far-fetched to some at the time but, four years later, they do not. Leclerc may not have racked up the same volume of wins as the likes of Alberto Ascari, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher, let alone the championships, but his capacity to take a car by the proverbial scruff of the neck and do great things with it is very much in the mould of Villeneuve. And the fans continue to venerate him for it.

You could almost taste his frustration in the Hungarian Grand Prix this year when, after qualifying on pole, he slipped back in the latter stages of the race. And his gung-ho pass on George Russell at Zandvoort was a delightful throwback to a less prescriptive age: shades of Villeneuve’s dice with Rene Arnoux for second place at Dijon in 1979.

Yes, Enzo Ferrari would have loved everything about Charles Leclerc – except, perhaps, for the fact that he has a powerful manager. Famously, Enzo had a veritable fit of the vapours when Juan Manuel Fangio arrived to finalise a contractual negotiation with his agent in attendance…

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Piero Lardi Ferrari reckons that his dad Enzo would have relished Leclerc’s talent

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images