FEATURE: CHARLES LECLERC – MISSEUR LECLERC

Charles Leclerc

HERE IS something a little bit special about Charles Leclerc. It is too early to class him as another Michael Schumacher or Ayrton Senna, but he has shown flashes of an elite driver’s ability to drag a car further up in the finishing order of a race than it deserves to be. And higher up than even good drivers and teammates could climb.

BY DAN KNUTSON

The 20-year-old Monégasque is in his rookie Formula 1 season with Sauber. It’s a fact that this year’s Sauber C37 chassis is far better than the 2017 model. And it’s hooked to the Ferrari power unit which is now the best on the track. Plus the team is improving overall with increased funding from Alfa Romeo.

But in 2017 Sauber finished last in the constructors’ championship with a mere five points. This year, while still only ninth in the standings, the team has earned 19 points after 13 of 21 races. And Leclerc was responsible for 13 of those points while his teammate Marcus Ericsson, who made his F1 debut with the now defunct Caterham team in 2014 and has driven for Sauber since 2015, netted the other six points.

“It’s been good, very positive,” Leclerc says when asked to assess his first half season in Formula 1. “The first three races were very difficult for me. A lot of things to learn about everything. About a car that is so much more powerful. So much more downforce. So many more people on the team. A lot more media. So, yeah, a lot of new things. But after that it has gone extremely well. Five times in the points. Then races with DNFs for some technical problems.”

That run of five finishes in the points happened between Azerbaijan and Austria. Then he retired while running in the points in Britain with what the team would only say was “an issue.” A 15th place in Germany followed after the wrong strategy calls were made in the rain. Things went worse in Hungary where he started 16th and retired on the first lap after some bump and run with other cars. Then came that scary first corner accident in Belgium where Fernando Alonso’s McLaren slid over the top of Leclerc’s Sauber.

Leclerc is very self-critical.

“I’ve always been more or less like this,” he notes. “It is important because I feel like I grow quicker when I am like this, and when I do an error I put my hand up and say I did a mistake. This is how you grow quicker in my opinion.”

But can he also drum up positives as well?

“It is extremely difficult for me to see anything positive to what I am doing,” he answers. “I am always very self-critical and I only see negatives at the job I do. I never look that way, when I do good races I say it is because of the team and when I do bad races, I say it is my fault.”

Will this attitude help him become world champion?

“I don’t know,” he says. “It is still very far away. Obviously just now I’ve exaggerated a little bit because when I do a good job I know how to recognise it to do a good job again in the car. I think it’s the right way to see things.”

THE LONE MONÉGASQUE

MANY A past and present racing driver resides in Monaco. Nico Rosberg, while born in Germany, has lived there most of his life. But Leclerc is a true Monégasque as he was born in the Principality on October 16, 1997.

When Leclerc finished sixth in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix he became the first Monégasque driver to score points in a championship F1 race since Louis Chiron finished third in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix.

Leclerc began his racing career in karting in 2005, and he won the French PACA Championship in 2005, 2006 and 2008. He moved up through the karting ranks, was the French Cadet champion in 2009, the Junior Monaco Kart Cup in 2009, and then in 2011 added the CIK-FIA KF3 World Cup, the CIK-FIA Karting Academy Trophy and the ERDF Junior Kart Masters. He continued in karting until 2013 when he took second in the CIK-FIA World KZ Championship won by Max Verstappen.

Like Verstappen, Leclerc moved quickly through the car racing ranks and on up to Formula 1. He competed in Formula Formula 2.0 in 2014 and the FIA Formula 3 championship in 2015. Then, in 2016, he won the GP3 championship with three victories and eight podiums. Ferrari and Haas then nominated him as a junior test driver.

Seven wins and 10 podiums earned Leclerc the 2017 FIA Formula 2 Championship, and he was a test driver for Ferrari and Sauber.
And all of that resulted in him making his Formula 1 racing debut with Sauber this year.

EASIER TO DRIVE

WHILE LECLERC had experience as a Formula 1 test driver, there is nothing like the real thing of racing the cars. He started off in the deep end of the 2018 season struggling to sort things out. He finished 13th in his debut in Australia, 12th in Bahrain and 19th in China. Then things started to click. So what had changed?

“It’s a combination of what I was asking of the car, that was completely wrong in the first three races,” he says. “Then you are in quite a negative spiral where the car is very difficult to drive, so you try to push more, and you do more errors, and everything is going quite badly.

“Then, when I understood which balance I wanted in this car, when I arrived in Baku and went with a much more stable balance, especially for the city track, and then we kept that for the rest of the season. And that went in a good direction, also for me, because I could push the limit. It was easier to feel the limit. And then we worked on that and it made a big step for me also because it was just easier to drive.”

Where is the car still lacking?

“It is pure lack of downforce,” Leclerc says. “There are some systems that the big teams and other teams use that we don’t have yet, but we will work on this and try to improve. It is the pure potential of the car that needs to be pushed up but we are very good at using the full potential of the car we have now and that’s our strength.”

BOSS VASSEUR

SAUBER TEAM Principal Frédéric Vasseur has known Leclerc for about 10 years, as Leclerc used to race for one of his karting teams. How is Leclerc dealing with the pressure of Formula 1?

“It’s not easy,” Vasseur says. “A few months ago he was in the F2 paddock and more or less nobody knew him. There is a huge difference between the end of November and today. He’s able to manage the situation. I’m impressed by his calm attitude. He’s able to stay calm, stay focused on the session.”

Vasseur scolds the media for being pessimistic about Leclerc after those initial three bad races.

“I would like to remind you that all of you in China were quite desperate with the level of Charles!” he says. “You said Charles is not performing! The week after, he’s the world champion! But honestly, we have to take it calm. He’s doing a good job, he’s improving but he’s not world champion. You have to do step by step.

“I don’t want to have Charles destroyed by everyone. He has a very good learning progress. He’s ramping up and I’m very happy and I’m very proud of the job he’s done.”

What has impressed Vasseur most about Leclerc this season?

“It’s the ability he had to manage the tough comments about him after Shanghai and the ability he has today to manage the good comments and to stay calm,” he replies.

Meanwhile, the Sauber team is getting better as well.

“We moved up from 320 people to more or less 400 and then 450 during the season,” Vasseur states. “It’s not easy, and you have to do it step by step. You have to eat and digest and eat and digest. You have to take 20 guys and reorganize a bit of the company, and then 20 guys more. Renault did it in the last 18 months, and we will be able to do it in the future.”

The team’s pitstops are now much better.

“We pushed like hell on the mechanics,” Vasseur said. “We sent them to fitness training in the offseason. They have done a great job. I don’t know how many pitstops they’ve done in the practice sessions, probably more than acceptable, but they did it. It’s paying off today. It’s one of the things I’m very proud off so far.”

THE LURE OF FERRARI

JUST ABOUT every racing driver in the world would love to drive for the fabled Scuderia Ferrari. Few get the call, of course, and the team has made a policy of only hiring experienced drivers. Could the rookie Leclerc be an exception? He already has an inside line as he is a member of the Ferrari Driver Academy, which promotes talented young drivers.

At the end of June, the Chairman & CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Ferrari Sergio Marchionne wanted Leclerc to replace Kimi Räikkönen for the rest of the season. The Ferrari team talked him out of it. Marchionne, who had been ill, passed away on July 25 following surgery complications. So Leclerc has lost an ally.

“It is always a pleasure to see some articles about me going to Ferrari because obviously it is a dream since I was a child,” he says. “But on the other hand, it is not difficult for me to come to a race weekend and switch to the mindset and racing to full focus to do the job I have to do. When I am at the track I definitely do not think about any rumors or anything like that.”

If Leclerc went to Ferrari next year, it would be as teammate to the vastly experienced four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel.

“It would be a great challenge,” Leclerc says. “At the same time, can you imagine how much I can learn and develop next to him?”

Vasseur has worked with a number of young talented drivers including Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and Romain Grosjean. Vasseur strongly advises against Leclerc making a move to Ferrari at this early stage of his Formula 1 career. It’s not that Vasseur wants to keep the prolific points scorer at Sauber, but rather that he’s concerned that Leclerc is too inexperienced to jump into all the pressure of a top team and especially Ferrari.

“Moving from Sauber to Ferrari is a big step,” Vasseur said. “We cannot predict what will happen, especially when it comes to drivers getting some money. In the last 20 years, there have been plenty of drivers who did very good first seasons in F1. I will not give names, but as soon as they touched their first cheque, they had trouble. They lost their roots because they discovered new things in life and lost a little bit of what they were doing.”

Leclerc has a contract with Sauber until the end of this season.

“We haven’t spoken so far about the future,” Vasseur says. “We are focused on our job. Charles is focused on the Sauber project. And then the future, we will discuss.”

Max Verstappen proved that a youngster can make the leap to a big team, but then Red Bull is far more laidback than Ferrari where the eyes of the Italian nation, the worldwide Ferrari nation, and the ever-critical Italian media, means that there is no place to hide.

Does Leclerc feel ready to race for Ferrari?

“It’s always very difficult to say whether I am ready or not because I’ve never experienced it,” he says.

Prior to the Italian Grand Prix weekend, Ferrari’s home race, Leclerc still didn’t know where he would end up in 2019. Ferrari? Stay at Sauber? Transfer over to Haas? But he was not concerned.

“I am sure I will be in this paddock next year in Formula 1,” he states.

Article originally published in Issue 1744 of Auto Action.

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