🇲🇨Charles
Leclerc

Charles Leclerc grew up in Monaco, the smallest principality in the world and the most famous racing circuit on earth. The streets that host the Monaco Grand Prix every May — the narrow canyon of Sainte Devote, the blind left at Massenet, the hairpin at the Fairmont — were the streets he cycled as a child and walked to school. He began karting at seven. By the time he was a teenager, he was already being compared, in hushed tones by people who knew what they were looking at, to the greatest drivers Monaco had produced. The comparison was premature. It was also, as it turned out, accurate.

Leclerc's career in junior motorsport was carried forward by a tragic undertow that could have destroyed a lesser character. His mentor was Jules Bianchi, the French Ferrari prospect and godson of Michael Schumacher, who had watched Leclerc develop from childhood and who was universally expected to be a future World Champion. Bianchi suffered a catastrophic accident at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix and died in July 2015, never having regained consciousness. He was twenty-five years old. Leclerc, seventeen, won his first karting title on the day Bianchi's accident occurred. He would go on to dedicate multiple race wins to Bianchi's memory, and he has spoken about his influence in terms that make clear how formative — and how irreversible — that loss was.

In 2017, Leclerc won the FIA Formula 2 Championship at nineteen years old — one of the youngest champions in the series' history. His season was won partly through brilliance and partly through something that silenced every commentator who watched it: on the weekend of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, his father Hervé Leclerc died after a long illness. Leclerc raced the following day. He qualified on the front row and finished fifth. The lap times from that qualifying session, placed alongside what any human being is expected to be capable of on the day after losing a parent, remain among the most extraordinary data points in the history of racing.

Ferrari signed Leclerc to replace Kimi Räikkönen for 2019 — a statement of intent from the sport's most famous team that was received with considerable scepticism, since Leclerc was twenty-one and had completed only one Formula 1 season. He rewarded that faith within months. At the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa — a race weekend that had claimed the life of his close friend Anthoine Hubert in a Formula 2 crash the previous day — Leclerc took pole position and then won the race, dedicating it to Hubert with tears visibly on his face across the radio. The following week, at Monza, he took pole and won again, becoming the first driver to score back-to-back victories at Ferrari's two most sacred circuits in over a decade. The Tifosi — the Ferrari faithful — had found their champion.

Since those 2019 victories, Leclerc has continued to develop into one of the two or three fastest drivers on the Formula 1 grid. He has taken multiple pole positions at Monaco — the circuit he grew up beside — without being able to convert them into victories, a sequence of near-misses that has become one of the most discussed puzzles in contemporary F1. He finally won his home race in 2024, breaking the curse in front of a crowd that included his family, his childhood friends, and most of the principality. The scenes that followed were among the most emotionally charged in the sport's recent history. He is twenty-seven years old. The championship, which Ferrari and Leclerc clearly intend to chase together for years to come, remains ahead of him.