At the end of 2019, Charles Leclerc signed a five-year deal to remain as a Ferrari driver until 2024. It was big news at the time and a huge show of faith as Formula One’s oldest team named a 22-year-old as the driver to lead it into a new decade.
Leclerc had made his debut with Ferrari earlier that year and went on to outperform his teammate, four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, over the course of the 2019 season. The bumper five-year contract, starting in 2020, was his reward, underlining Ferrari’s belief that Leclerc, rather than Vettel, would be the driver to end the team’s then 13-year title drought.
Fast forward to today and nearly four of those five contractual years have elapsed, yet title success seems as elusive as ever for Ferrari. Without a car capable of sustaining a title challenge, the closest Leclerc has come to his goal was a distant second place to world champion Max Verstappen in last year’s standings and he has scored just three more wins to add to the two he already had at the end of 2019.
This year the points gap to Verstappen at the front of the field has more than doubled to 354 (with two races remaining) and Leclerc looks unlikely to finish higher than seventh in the standings. It would be understandable if the lofty hope and expectation that surrounded his arrival at Ferrari five years ago had descended into intense pressure and frustration, but speaking to ESPN in a recent interview Leclerc insists that is not the case.
There is so much passion around the team that you of course feel the responsibility, but that doesn’t add pressure to me,” he said. “I’m not someone that is getting pressure, I just enjoy what I do with a lot of passion and a lot of dedication in trying to do the best job possible and hopefully becoming a world champion as soon as possible.”
At the start of the 2022 season it looked as though Leclerc might fulfil his Ferrari destiny. He started the year with two wins from three races and led eventual-champion Verstappen by 46 points in the standings after the Australian Grand Prix in April.
What happened next was a story of mistakes — both by Ferrari and himself — and misfortune that ultimately left Leclerc second in the standings, 146 points shy of Verstappen. This year the performance of the car has slid further relative to Red Bull, with Leclerc seventh in the drivers’ standings and behind Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz.
With his contract up at the end of next year and the potential for openings at a number of other teams on the grid, has he thought about what he could achieve in a different car?
“I don’t really think to that because Ferrari is so special and I wouldn’t change my position with anyone else on the grid.
“Do I want to win world championships? Of course, this is the same for everybody, but do I want to change my place with anyone? No, I don’t.”
To understand Leclerc’s connection with Ferrari is to understand what it means to have a second family in sport. Leclerc’s godfather, the late Jules Bianchi, was being prepared to drive for Ferrari when he suffered fatal head injuries in an accident at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix while racing for the now-defunct Marussia team.
Bianchi’s manager Nicolas Todt, who had signed Leclerc as a go-karter in 2011, ensured the Monaco native became part of the Ferrari Driver Academy from 2016 onwards, providing crucial support at a time when Leclerc’s self-raised funds were unlikely to cover his next step up the motorsport ladder to the GP3 Series. Leclerc then trod the path to F1 that had been cleared for Bianchi before him, arriving at the pinnacle of the sport with Alfa Romeo in 2018 before making his Ferrari debut in 2019 at just 21 years old.
At the 2019 Belgian Grand Prix he secured his first win for the team and from that point onwards the next goal was always going to be a world championship.
“I have always been dreaming of being a Formula One driver, and even more so with Ferrari,” he said. “It’s a bit of a family feeling now, it’s been so many years I have been within the team, whether it is as an actual race driver for Ferrari or at the Ferrari Driver Academy in the years before.
“It’s been many years together and I want to finish the mission with a world championship.”
