This weekend’s upcoming British Grand Prix at Silverstone is an anniversary of sorts for Charles Leclerc, as it marks 10 years since he made his public Formula 1 debut as a Friday test driver with Haas, courtesy of his Ferrari connections. It was the first of four outings that the then-GP3 driver had with the U.S.-owned team that year. He switched to a similar test role with Ferrari customer Sauber in 2017, while also winning the F2 title. That led to a race seat with the Swiss outfit in 2018, followed by his graduation to the works team the following year.
Leclerc has been a front runner ever since—at least, when the car has allowed him to be, as his 27 pole positions attest. However the fact that he’s only won eight times suggests that fortune hasn’t always gone his way on Sundays. That’s certainly been the case this year, and in recent weeks, his teammate Lewis Hamilton has generally had the upper hand. Leclerc was wrong-footed by the SF-26’s brakes in Canada and Monaco, crashing out in the latter. He was happier after switching to the same arrangement as Hamilton for Barcelona, but he couldn’t match his teammate in the race, and wound up a late retirement with a hydraulic issue.
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Despite all that misfortune, he arrived in Austria last weekend in an upbeat mood, determined to get back on track. “I think the last few races haven’t been nice,” Leclerc said on Thursday. “When I look at it in an objective way, Monaco and Spain have been a lot worse than what it should have been on paper. Obviously, we’ve had two technical issues, two races in a row, and that cost us a lot of points. It’s also true that I haven’t been as comfortable in the car as I was earlier this season. But in Barcelona, I found that feeling again, so that is that is a positive. In Monaco and Canada, it [was] more difficult for other issues.”
He sounded confident that he can turn things around. “I’m not too stressed about the pace in itself, I just want to put a weekend together now with the team, and be back to where we should be,” he said. “Because it’s been too long; there’s been one thing or another that impeded us doing what we had to do on a Sunday.”
He did indeed signs of being back on track in Austria when he qualified second, just ahead of Hamilton. Alas, it all fell apart again in the race, and he soon lost out to both his teammate and Max Verstappen. On a day when the SF-26 used up its tires, he slipped back to P8, and the last of the runners from the top four teams. Hamilton also struggled with tire life and grip, but finished three places and almost 20 seconds ahead.
“It was just an incredibly difficult race—very, very low grip overall,” said Leclerc when asked by Road & Track about his Sunday afternoon. “Just struggled to have the car and the tires, especially, in the right window—especially the rears, just missing a lot of rear grip. Still a lot of work to be done. I think I’ve been working very hard in the past weeks, because there was always one reason or another that made me struggle on the Sunday or on the Saturday. At the moment, there’s always a reason why there’s a struggle. And that probably means that I don’t really have a clear picture of what I want from this car. And yeah, I’ve got to find that.”
He also didn’t agree with the suggestion that he was at least closer to Hamilton this time around. “That’s a long shot. I’ve struggled quite a lot today. Lewis got a good start, and then got track position, which maybe helped a little bit at the beginning. But even when we were in free air, I think he had a bit more pace than I did.”
From the outside, it’s hard to understand why a package that looked so good in Barcelona could be so tricky just two weeks later. “It’s difficult for us to understand as well,” Leclerc admitted. “Saturday, I think with low fuel, the car was quite nice,; the front end was quite strong, and I liked this better than in the race today. The front end stays strong, but I had no rear. So it’s a balance that you’ve got to find that, on this car, is particularly difficult.”
“As a whole, I think it’s difficult to understand the pecking order this year,” he went on. “It goes from one extreme to the other … when there’s a team that seems to be struggling massively in one weekend, the weekend after, they seem to be very strong. If you compare Barcelona to here, there’s been a big swing of performance for us, for sure.”
Having beaten Hamilton for most of last year, it can’t be easy for Leclerc to see the former champ building momentum and getting the team on his side. The seven-time World Champion has benefited greatly from having a car that he helped to develop this year, rather than the SF-25 he inherited last season.
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To his credit, Leclerc doesn’t agree with the suggestion that the characteristics of the car as favored by Hamilton don’t suit him. “I honestly don’t think that this is the case,” he said in Austria. “It’s not that I don’t feel comfortable with this year’s car. It’s just that in Montreal particularly, and in Monaco, we’ve had some issues that have been very, very tricky, and there I’ve lost a bit of confidence with the car. But not with the package in itself.”
“Last year, [I had] a very strong season, and we were working as a team on this project. It’s not like we go one way or the other. And as I’ve said in the past, these cars are very, very different, but nowadays we’ve got a lot of freedom with the setup to make sure that a car fits your driving.”
These are tough times for Leclerc. It’s not as if his job is under threat; only a few weeks ago, he signed a contract extension that is probably the envy of many drivers who would like to have a similar level of security. However, at 28 years old and in his eighth season at Ferrari, he no doubt wants to achieve so much more.