Charles Leclerc: The Monegasque Marvel’s Relentless Pursuit of Excellence

The year was 2018, and the event was the Brazilian Grand Prix qualifying. The Vettel versus Hamilton saga had reached its peak crescendo. While Red Bull were throwing in a few punches, little could be done as the Mercedes versus Ferrari battle took F1 that year to the brink.

But out in Brazil, a young man driving for Sauber had plans of his own. While he was totally aware that he wasn’t in a race-winning car, let alone a championship-winning one, he wasn’t going to refrain from regaling fans and pundits alike.

Driving to the limit at Brazil

However, there was a problem. In the mid-stages of the qualifying for the 2018 Brazilian Grand Prix, rain came in and made it a wet session. While Ferrari and Mercedes were struggling for grip despite having the necessary pace to lock in key grid positions, you wouldn’t have fancied a Sauber’s chances.

Just when his team asked him to return to the pits during the fading moments of Q3, the then 21-year-old was unbothered by the team’s instruction. It wasn’t arrogance. Anything but; it was pure confidence that Charles Leclerc had in himself. He relented and said, “No.. no.. no one more lap. Let’s see what we get!”

The result was a fighting P8, and that too, in a Sauber, a team that, with much due respect to its illustrious past in Formula 1 racing, had been a backmarker.

But not on Leclerc’s watch.

Not on that occasion. After stunning both Martin Brundle and David “Crofty” Croft with his dazzling effort in qualifying, a day later, Leclerc scored a fighting seventh in the race. He had left several drivers behind, such as Perez, Hulkenberg, and Sainz, the latter now his teammate at Ferrari. The iconic British commentator remarked, “Can’t wait to see this kid at Ferrari next year.”

Perhaps Brundle was echoing the sentiment of hundreds of thousands of Ferrari fans. A few months later, having switched from his white and red racing overalls at Sauber to fully red racing colors at Maranello, Charles Leclerc welcomed a new chapter of his life. Many, you’d think, would love to part with any luxury of life to simply get an opportunity to become a Formula 1 driver. But here was a young driver, not yet 22, who had signed a long-term contract with Ferrari.

And this was no “inchident”

After the season-opening round in Australia, it was time for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

A place where Charles Leclerc couldn’t have done it any better by grabbing pole position in his maiden assignment with the Scuderia family. Early naysayers, the lot that measures in lots and has no better thing in life other than downing the reputation of others and casting doubts over others’ talents, were served a brutal warning by this avid youngster.

A lap time of 1:27:866 hammered the likes of Ricciardo, Verstappen, Vettel, and even the man behind the moniker “Hammertime”: Sir Lewis Hamilton himself.

But on race day, Leclerc struggled for grip and saw himself losing out to Vettel within minutes of the start of the action at Sakhir. Next to pass him would be the twin Mercedes of Bottas and Hamilton.

But what slipped out of his hand initially wasn’t lost altogether; after losing the race lead to his celebrated German teammate, Leclerc mounted a strong comeback and made a stellar move down the inside of the other Ferrari before opening a big gap to even the two Mercedes drivers.

And that was when he found something “strange on the engine.” With these exact words, you could feel the agony in Leclerc’s voice. The pain was in the Ferrari paddock for all to see. The engineers decried, “There is no H recovery.”

Meanwhile, another said, “Engine 12!”

Leclerc, all this time, relented and kept pushing. Finally, Hulkenberg and Ricciardo had a skirmish in the closing stages, even though there was no spectacular crash, and fortunately so.

But this prompted the deployment of first the yellow flags and later, the safety car. With Verstappen and Bottas coming desperately close to the Ferrari newcomer, Charles Leclerc kept his car clear and out of danger. In the end, what should have ideally been a first victory in F1 culminated in a maiden Grand Prix podium.

It was bittersweet. But it was also indicative of Leclerc’s valiance. The grit.

The passion for excellence and the mad love for driving, racing, competing.

Wise beyond his years

While you’d think that many others would have simply harangued in sheer frustration, Leclerc was quite the opposite. At the completion of the Bahrain Grand Prix of 2019, he exclaimed:

“Sometimes it’s just not your day, and today was not ours. It’s life. It happens. But we will come back stronger”.

Now, in an age where just about anyone is an opinion maker on social media, even as some have a natural talent for mindless ranting, there would have been a few who’d have said that Leclerc was just being cool or putting up an act.

But in reality, the Monegasque wasn’t bluffing.

He did come back stronger, as he had shared at Sakhir. That very year, he beat Hamilton at Monza and, before that, took a phenomenal maiden race win at Spa-Francorchamps, where he battled Vettel as well as Hamilton. It’s one thing to win a race, but something quite different to keep your tail in front of a certain Lewis Hamilton.

But 2019 was the year that marked the grit and determination of the new boy at Scuderia. The Monegasque at Maranello.

The resident of Monaco but the driver who becomes a racer once adorning the red racing overalls! This year again, Leclerc won at Monza, his seventh career win. Prior to that, he excelled with great speed and dazzling car control at Monaco and displayed the desire to bounce back at the very venue that had chastised him and left him bereft of that victory he had long craved. Surely, Leclerc ought to thank—and he did, as a matter of fact—his teammate Sainz, whose gritty defensive driving enabled Charles to chip away in the dazzling SF-24 on the streets of the famous principality.

But the Leclerc story isn’t only defined by ecstatic wins. It points to an array of disappointments that could so easily have dissuaded any weak-hearted. He lost his father even before he could make his F1 debut. Legend has it that during his father’s declining years owing to a prolonged illness, Charles had lied to his father about being hired by Ferrari, a long-time dream of the Leclerc family in Monaco.

Today, Charles drives for the very team he once cooked up a story to please his ailing father with.

Today, Leclerc has a win at his home Grand Prix, and that too, with Ferrari. But he’s also lost his closest on- and off-track friend and mentor, Jules Bianchi.

What’s more?

Leclerc has often had his own team binning sureshot chances of winning a Grand Prix. Sometimes, it’s a misjudged call by the strategy department, and others, it’s the wrong choice of tires. He’s even been asked to box too late and, on other occasions, too early.

A couple of seasons ago, Monaco was a strange case. Then, there have been times when Ferrari haven’t really paired him with a strong car.

But what’s definitive about Charles Leclerc is that he never gave up.

Even in this season, while he was many points adrift of his Spanish teammate at the start of the world championship, Leclerc is 55 points out in the clear over Sainz. That is where it stands today.

The talented and, at times, really rapid Spaniard is sort of struggling in fifth, while the Monaco-born ladykiller is holding on tightly to third. In Leclerc’s world, setting fastest laps and blazing pole laps, such as his fourth consecutive pole on the trot at Baku, home to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, are existential realities.

Ditto is the case with making last-lap maneuvers, such as the final lap startling move over Perez at the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix (2023). One hopes there surely will be a day when the whole of Maranello and the wider F1 world outside it will stand to applaud the boy born in Europe but with global fan bases in America as well as Asia.

There will be that day when Hamilton will stand on the podium in red to applaud his more experienced Ferrari teammate called Leclerc.

A great future beckons

And one shall also wait for that day when F1’s Iceman, the king of laconic expressions known as Kimi Raikkonen, will sport a broad smile to congratulate Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc upon breaking his record by lifting the world title for Ferrari and thereby becoming the first since Kimi in 2007 to do so.

It’s been a long time. It’s been more than a while. But truth also is that the future belongs to those who persist today. Leclerc certainly is. May he go and win many a mile.

Happy 27th Charles Leclerc from the F1 Chronicle family.