A crash in Monaco. A technical fault at Barcelona. A lowly eighth in Austria. Charles Leclerc had never endured such a poor run of form since Ferrari’s tricky 2020 Formula 1 campaign – but he ended it in the best possible way at Silverstone.
Leclerc took the lead at the start in Northamptonshire and dominated the race to claim his first grand prix victory since the 2024 Austin round, though championship leader Kimi Antonelli’s challenge was thwarted by a broken wheel shield.
Read Also:
Toto Wolff: I stand by Mercedes’ performance focus, but now we must sort reliability
The contrast could hardly have been starker. Of course, it was even more manifest due to team-mate Lewis Hamilton’s upturn in form of late – which the seven-time world champion partly attributed to no longer using the simulator in Maranello – and Leclerc’s own issues.
In Monaco, the home hero blamed his crash from third on his brakes – even though supplier Brembo disagreed – and he suffered another shunt of his own making in Barcelona qualifying before a hydraulics issue took him out of the race as he lay sixth.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
At the Red Bull Ring, Leclerc qualified second, but Ferrari lacked race pace – so did the Monegasque relative to his team-mate – and he ended up a lowly eighth under the chequered flag.
So, by the time F1 went to Silverstone, there was talk of Leclerc needing to bounce back – but team principal Fred Vasseur insists his driver’s performance always looked decent on data and was simply hindered by circumstances.
“That means that you are not putting things together, and the others are scoring points, and you have the feeling that you are losing a little bit the path of this,” Vasseur said after the race. “But in terms of performance, I was still optimistic with Charles, because we saw that on data that he was there, he was always there on the laps, and it’s paying off today – or this weekend.”
Key to Leclerc’s improvement was set-up work and a switch to Hamilton’s Carbone Industrie brake discs. Now, Vasseur believes the 28-year-old’s return to victory will provide a substantial gain when it comes to his state of mind.
“I think the result of today is the best boost of the confidence that he can have at first,” the Frenchman said.
Frederic Vasseur, Ferrari
“As we are developing the car from the beginning of the season, we need to readjust the set-up each time. On top [of that], Charles had a change of brakes a couple of races ago. We [had] to reshape a little bit everything. But it was not just a matter of performance, performance was there. I think it was more a matter of confidence. And this will help him massively today.
“He found the confidence that each step of set-up is not making a proper difference in terms of lap time, but sometimes it’s giving them confidence to push a bit more. And for race pace it’s crucial that today he was very consistent all over the race. If you have a look at the first 20 laps, he was [within] one or two tenths. And it was a key for us to win the fight with Antonelli.”
Read Also:
How Charles Leclerc has changed his steering wheel software for the first time since joining Ferrari
Leclerc wouldn’t delve into how exactly the set-up was fine-tuned, explaining it was “small details that just fit my driving a little bit better in a particular phase of the corner”. Those specific tweaks were made after the Silverstone sprint race, where Leclerc finished fifth after losing three places on lap one, and gave him more confidence in the SF-26.
“That was a lot better,” he continued. “I was very proud of the work we’ve done to see that because I think this kind of change is not really so black and white. You just don’t look at data and say, ‘My God, OK, this is what we need to change’. It’s intuition mixed with feeling. Then we went for it and it was actually a very successful direction for me. I was very happy.”
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Not just happy, but relieved, after the previous few weeks cast doubt on his previously irrefutable status as Ferrari’s best-performing driver.
“It means a lot,” Leclerc said. “It means a lot because when things get tough – and that’s literally the situation I’ve been in the last few races – obviously there’s a lot of negativity around me in general, with narratives being created, and it’s never a nice environment to work in.”
Asked if that fuelled him to prove things wrong, however, he pondered: “Well, I don’t know if it fuels me. Honestly, I think anybody that says that would lie. I think whenever there’s so much negativity around, it’s not something so nice to see.
“So no, I mean, you try to cancel the noise as much as possible. I try to not look at my phone and focus on what is relevant and in order to also have the right picture of the situation, because things are said and you go from hero to zero, from zero to hero, in like two days in this sport, and so it can influence then the way you see a situation.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
“So no, my job was really to just try and cancel that noise, to not look at anything, to not listen to anything. And I know that I didn’t become a bad driver from one day to the other. It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car. These cars are very specific, are very different to the way we’ve been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it.
“I was very strong for the first part of the season, then I lost a bit of feeling with the car. We changed quite a few things with the car and it took a bit more time than what I had wished to get back to the level I wanted. And on top of that, we’ve had some issues on Sundays that cost me quite a lot of points.
“So altogether, it wasn’t a nice situation to be in, but I’m very happy to get out of this situation in this way.
“However, it’s still the beginning. It’s only one race and I must not get carried away thinking that the war is over. I mean, the battle with this car has been quite a lot recently and I cannot take it for granted that now it’s behind me. So, I’ll keep working and try to get that feeling more often going ahead.”
Spa-Francorchamps, where Leclerc took his maiden Formula 1 victory on a grim weekend in 2019, will be a first opportunity to confirm whether his return to form is genuine.
Additional reporting by Filip Cleeren
Read Also:
Toto Wolff: I stand by Mercedes’ performance focus, but now we must sort reliability
Audi highlights “importance of efficiency” in next-generation F1 engines
To read more Motorsport.com articles visit our website.
