You’d forgive Charles Leclerc for having had lofty expectations for the 2025 Formula 1 season. After all, Ferrari did narrowly miss out on the constructors’ world title last year, so the team was expected to be at the front of the field again.
It didn’t quite go that way, and Leclerc’s seventh season with the Scuderia arguably was his worst since 2021 – at least in terms of results.
But there’s not much to blame the Monegasque for. Leclerc had something to prove alongside incoming seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who had never been consistently outperformed by a team-mate; in the end, he was rarely matched by the Briton.
Having been somewhat of a qualifying specialist, Leclerc didn’t quite shine as much as he used to as the SF-25 was less competitive than its predecessors, but he still reached Q3 on 29 occasions, with the top 10 only eluding him in Imola – where he still outqualified Hamilton.
Leclerc particularly shone on slower tracks. In a processional Monaco race, Leclerc finished second after qualifying in that same spot; in Hungary, he took pole just a few hundredths ahead of the McLarens and led the race early on before a technical issue dropped him out of the podium positions. He still managed seven top-three finishes overall, when Hamilton failed to achieve one at all.
But the Ferrari golden kid was the team player as ever. When his dominance over Hamilton was brought up, he would insist that his only goal was to bring Ferrari back to the top: “Lewis is not my target at the moment.”
Taking Ferrari back to glory, though, has seemed like a tall order. As the season went on, the SF-25 proved trickier and trickier to drive. Leclerc felt like a “passenger”, described the car as “very snappy and unpredictable”. In Qatar, where he struggled not to lose control of his machinery, even he couldn’t find the words to express how poor the situation was.
“Am I optimistic for tomorrow? I am not, which is quite rare,” he then told F1 TV. “Normally I'm a very optimistic person, but I have to say that this weekend, there's zero performance in this car.”
Ferrari switched its resources to 2026’s new technical regulations earlier than most, which hampered its performance in 2025 but will provide it with an opportunity to bounce back next year. The Scuderia will need to, if it wants Leclerc to keep what he may need the most: hope.
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