Charles Leclerc's Commitment to Ferrari and Fred Vasseur
Charles Leclerc didn’t just re-sign for Ferrari. He doubled down on a belief system – and at the heart of it stands Fred Vasseur.
The Monegasque, whose 2026 season opened with bruising weekends in Monaco, Barcelona and Austria – two DNFs and a lonely eighth-place finish – chose that turbulent moment to commit his future to the Scuderia with a new multi-year deal. No safety net. No hedging.
“It just felt right,” he said on F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast, and the simplicity of that line says plenty about where his head is. For Leclerc, Ferrari is still home.
‘I believe in Fred 200 per cent’
Leclerc has worn red in Formula 1 since 2019, but his ties to the Ferrari family stretch back much further. The bond has survived the false dawns, the strategic missteps, the title hopes that never quite materialised. His target has not changed.
“I don't want to give up on my ultimate goal, which is to become a World Champion with Ferrari,” he said. No caveats, no talk of escape routes.
What has changed is his conviction in the project under Vasseur.
“I believe in the project, I believe in every single person of the team,” Leclerc explained. “We are in a year where we've been showing innovation. We are very aggressive also in the production plan and in the upgrades we are bringing. That gives me lots of hopes for the future.”
Then came the line that really cuts through: “Fred is a big reason why I have signed again as well. I believe in Fred 200 percent.”
This isn’t a throwaway compliment. Leclerc and Vasseur go back years, to junior categories where the Frenchman helped shape the young driver’s career. That history has now been transplanted into the most pressurised environment in motorsport.
“It feels like I know Fred since forever,” Leclerc said. “He's the kind of person that you speak once and… it's the values. There's just something that was naturally working from the beginning and you cannot quite explain that.”
From the first serious talks about Ferrari’s future, Leclerc felt the connection move beyond a standard team-principal–driver dynamic.
“The bond is stronger than just a work, business relationship,” he added. For a driver who has ridden out so many emotional swings in red, that kind of trust matters.
When Hamilton soared and Leclerc stumbled
The timing of his new deal was striking because on track, the picture looked anything but settled.
While Leclerc was wrestling with inconsistency, Lewis Hamilton – in his first season with Ferrari – found immediate traction. The seven-time World Champion banked back-to-back second places in Canada and Monaco, then delivered his first Ferrari win in Barcelona. Same car, very different story.
Leclerc knew he had to respond, but he also knew the trap: trying to become a Hamilton copy.
“It's not as easy as, ‘Oh, Lewis is doing that. I'll just do the same,’” he said. “Lewis is an incredibly talented driver and has a natural driving style that is his and he's the best in the world for that particular driving style. To reproduce that is very tricky.”
So he went another way. Instead of mimicking, he pushed Ferrari to tune the car to him.
“I tried to push more into trying to find ways to have this car a bit more fitted to my driving style,” he explained. The answers weren’t sitting neatly in the data traces.
“In Formula 1, it's not always black and white,” Leclerc said. “It's not like you sit in front of your computer, look at the data and say, ‘Oh, this is one tenth and a half of a second. Let's change that.’ It's not as easy as that. It's intuition. It's feeling.”
He hunted for the small irritations, the sensations that made him uneasy in the cockpit.
“It's things that you might think, ‘Okay, this is what makes me a bit less comfortable in the car. And if I improve that feeling, then performance will come.’”
Silverstone provided the first real vindication. After changes that weekend, Leclerc not only felt more at one with the car – he won.
He called it a step in the “right direction”, but the real shift came in his mindset: stop thinking, start flowing.
Fighting the curse of overthinking
Modern Formula 1 cars are moving targets. Development never stops, and the balance Leclerc felt in Melbourne, or any early race, doesn’t simply return with a set-up tweak.
“The car is constantly changing so it's not like I can really go back to that feeling I had in Melbourne,” he said. The solution isn’t nostalgia. It’s adaptability.
“My goal is to get into the car and not overthink,” he admitted. In Leclerc’s view, the brain can be as big an enemy as understeer.
“When you overthink, you know that you are losing time on the table because our sport is not a lot about reacting on what's happening on the car. It's more about anticipating and feeling the car.”
The best laps, the ones that decide pole or victory, come when instinct takes over.
“Getting into a corner, I need to know exactly the way the car will behave so I don't have to overthink about things,” he said. “I think overthinking is killing performance.”
That’s where the idea of “flow state” enters his vocabulary – not as a buzzword, but as a target.
“When things come naturally, that's where I think the flow state that we speak about, racing drivers or athletes as well, the flow state when things just flow naturally is really where you use 100 per cent of your potential. When you've got to overthink things, that’s where it becomes trickier.”
For a driver whose raw speed has never been in doubt, the battle now is to protect that flow across a full season, through the inevitable rough patches, under the weight of Ferrari expectation.
Chasing Mercedes, one upgrade at a time
On the constructors’ side, the scoreboard remains unforgiving. Ferrari sit second in the standings, 87 points adrift of Mercedes. Respectable, but not what Leclerc signed up for.
Can they really reel in the Silver Arrows? He refuses to get drawn into bold predictions.
“It’s not something I really want to put energy towards thinking about too much,” he said. His focus is narrower, and more pragmatic: the upgrade race.
“This championship will be won with upgrades. The upgrades are so powerful with these cars,” Leclerc stressed.
With the current regulations cutting overall downforce, every gain matters.
“We've got a lot less downforce than we used to in the past, so every point of downforce you add to this car has got a much bigger influence on how the car feels like on track. So the pecking order can change so quickly one way or another.”
That volatility shapes his approach.
“I'm very much focused race by race and not really thinking about the long-term picture about if we've got a real shot with that championship,” he said. “But surely until it's not finished, I'll keep believing in it and we'll see how it goes.”
The dream remains crystal clear: a world title, in red.
“The championship is something that I will dream of ticking off one day, particularly with the red team, this has been a dream of mine since many years. I feel we are getting closer. When will that be? I don’t know, I hope as early as it can be.”
He has nailed his colours to the mast, backed Vasseur without hesitation, and accepted the risk that comes with tying his prime years to a project still chasing the benchmark.
The question now is simple, and brutal: will Ferrari’s upgrades – and Leclerc’s faith – arrive in time to turn that dream into a championship before this window closes?
