Leclerc Claims First Silverstone Win After 37-Race Drought

• Charles Leclerc won the British Grand Prix for the first time in his career, ending a drought that stretched 37 races back to the United States Grand Prix in October 2024, a span of more than 20 months without a victory.
• Leclerc called out “Finally!” over team radio before telling his engineers that “tough times never last, only tough people last,” reflecting on a run of crashes and mechanical failures at Monaco, Barcelona, and Austria he described as “very difficult mentally.”
• The result hands Ferrari their second win in three grands prix and increases the pressure on championship leader Kimi Antonelli, whose wheel-shield failure at Silverstone left him without points for the second time in three races.

Charles Leclerc said one word when he crossed the finish line at Silverstone: “Finally.”

His first British Grand Prix victory had just ended a 37-race winless run that stretched back to the United States Grand Prix on October 20, 2024. In that time, he had watched Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton take his maiden win for the team in Barcelona, seen Kimi Antonelli win five races in a row, and gone through a run of crashes, technical failures, and weekends where the car simply did not respond the way he needed it to. At Silverstone, something clicked back into place.

“It feels incredible,” Leclerc told ESPN. “Maybe it did not finish the way I would have dreamed of, but to win after the last few weekends […] is incredible.”

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A Race Settled at the First Corner

Leclerc started from second place on the grid, alongside championship leader Kimi Antonelli on pole. What followed at the start set the tone for the entire afternoon. Leclerc beat Antonelli off the line and into the first corner, and from that point forward he controlled the race.

With Lewis Hamilton penalised for a false start and Antonelli falling back through the field before his mechanical failure arrived, Leclerc was rarely under serious pressure at the front. He managed his tyres through the first stint and extended his lead through the pit stop phase without incident. The main threat came only when Antonelli, running on much fresher rubber in the final segment, appeared in his mirrors and began closing at a significant rate.

Antonelli’s wheel-shield failure with 11 laps remaining removed his chief challenger at the moment when Mercedes’ own simulations had suggested the 19-year-old was on course to overtake. Leclerc acknowledged the role fortune played in his result.

The race finished under a Safety Car following Max Verstappen’s late spin into the gravel at Stowe, which denied Leclerc the clean final sprint he had been prepared for. He would have settled for the result either way.

The victory felt sweeter for the struggle that preceded it, Leclerc said, and he admitted he had wished for a more conventional ending.

Three Weekends That Tested Him

The weeks leading into Silverstone had been a difficult stretch for Leclerc by any measure. At Monaco in early June, he crashed in qualifying and was then hit by a technical problem in the race. In Barcelona the following weekend, the car felt competitive in qualifying, then he crashed again. In Austria, neither the result nor the feeling in the car matched what he and Ferrari had expected.

“After Monaco, the feeling wasn’t there. I crashed in qualifying, then in the race we had an issue, and that ended our race,” Leclerc told ESPN. “Then, Saturday in Barcelona, the feeling was good, but then I crashed again, so that was very difficult mentally. And then on Sunday, we had an issue with the car, and Austria wasn’t so great, but here we managed to put everything together, and I really hope I can keep that momentum going forward.”

Across those three rounds, Leclerc had not been on the podium at all. His last podium finish before Silverstone was the Japanese Grand Prix at the end of March. That is a long stretch for a driver of his calibre, and it gave the Silverstone result a significance beyond the 25 points it added to the standings.

Over team radio after crossing the line, Leclerc made his feelings plain. “Tough times never last, only tough people last!” he called out. The team’s celebrations that followed suggested they felt every word of it.

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Finding the Feeling Again

What unlocked the Silverstone performance, Leclerc said, was work done between the Sprint race on Saturday morning and qualifying later that afternoon. He described finding “something” in that window that restored the balance and front-end response he had been searching for across the preceding weeks.

“All the work that we put into trying to get the feeling back in the car,” he said. “I felt like I had found something yesterday between the sprint race and qualifying, but I had to confirm that today, and today the feeling was back where it needs to be, so I’m so incredibly happy.”

He was quick to direct credit toward the team for the persistence they had shown through three difficult rounds, and for the work put in to identify what was missing from the car’s setup.

“And a huge thank you to the team for having worked so hard,” Leclerc said.

The challenge now is carrying that feeling through to Belgium and beyond. Leclerc knows from experience how quickly the car’s character can shift from one circuit to the next, and one win does not guarantee the next venue will feel the same way. But the sense that the setup problems have been understood, rather than papered over, gives the Silverstone result more value than the raw points total suggests.

Ferrari’s Championship Opportunity

Ferrari have now won two of the last three grands prix in 2026, with Hamilton’s Barcelona win and Leclerc’s Silverstone victory bracketing Russell’s Austrian Grand Prix result. The pace is there. The car is capable of winning. The questions around setup feel and Leclerc’s form through the difficult middle stretch of the season appear, for now, to have been answered.

For the championship, Leclerc’s win arrives at a moment when Antonelli is under pressure he has not faced before. The 19-year-old’s lead has been cut from 66 points after Monaco to just 25 at the close of the British Grand Prix, with three races accounting for a swing that no one expected going into the summer. Hamilton sits 32 points behind Antonelli. Leclerc, who had gone more than three months without a podium before Silverstone, is now back in the fight as a third contender in the title race.

The Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps runs from July 17 to 19. Ferrari will head there having won at Silverstone. Leclerc will arrive knowing the car is capable of the front row, of leading from the opening corner, and of withstanding whatever the race demands. The drought is over. The next question is whether Silverstone marks the start of a sustained run, or whether it stands as a single bright result in a difficult season.

Given what Leclerc said after the race, he is not treating it as a one-off.

Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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