2025 Formula 1 mid-season driver rankings #4: Charles Leclerc

In his seventh season as a Ferrari driver, Charles Leclerc has not been fazed one iota by the arrival of Formula 1’s most successful driver of all time in the garage next to him.

But the problems Ferrari has experienced with its car clearly came as a profound disappointment and frustration. Having ended last year as a regular contender for victories, Leclerc must have expected to be in the hunt for the title this year, but after 14 rounds the team is yet to take a victory in a grand prix.

Leclerc has consistently done his best with a car which has too rarely inspired the confidence he needs to unleash the devastating one-lap pace we’ve come to expect from him. The SF-25 also appears to be a particularly challenging car in wet conditions.

Both traits were clear in the season-opener at Melbourne, where Leclerc qualified a disappointing seventh and finished one place lower in the grand prix. The depth of the team’s plight was highlighted in China, where Leclerc was quick enough to beat his sprint race-winning team mate in the grand prix, but both cars were disqualified for technical infringements.

Nonetheless, Leclerc persevered, and ground out some strong results. He qualified well at Suzuka and beat the Mercedes for fourth, then claimed a fine second on the grid in Bahrain but couldn’t hold Lando Norris back for third. In Jeddah, however, he produced a terrific drive to claim Ferrari’s first podium finish of the year, out-running the recovering Norris.

Leclerc’s consistently stronger pace than team mate Lewis Hamilton has led to some grief when the pair have intersected on-track, as in China and, notably, Miami. The team handled the situation more successfully in Imola where neither driver managed to get into Q3 but Leclerc, after a luckless race, played the team game to help Hamilton.

As Ferrari began to get to grips with their car, Leclerc delivered some stand-out drives. He showed his usual flair in Monaco where only a superb qualifying lap from Norris kept Leclerc from a serious chance of repeating his 2024 win. A second consecutive podium finish followed in Spain where he sacrificed grid position for fresher tyres, a decision which paid off when the Safety Car arrived late in the race, enabling him to pounce on Max Verstappen.

Canada proved a setback, Leclerc qualifying only eighth after a crash in practice, from where he recovered to fifth. But he was back on the podium in Austria, comfortably the strongest driver behind the McLaren pair, taking third.

There’s no doubting Silverstone was Leclerc’s worst performance of the season so far. A hasty gamble on slick tyres at the start proved the precursor to a grim afternoon where he grappled with his Ferrari on a damp track and went off more than once, taking Carlos Sainz Jnr’s Williams with him at one stage.

However armed with a floor upgrade at Spa, Leclerc banished the memory of that slog to 14th place by returning to the podium with a superb drive, narrowly out-qualifying Verstappen and holding him off all the way. A shock pole position at the Hungaroring looked likely to yield another podium until Leclerc suffered some mysterious car problem in the second half of the race.

It remains to be seen whether the step forward Ferrari have with their car will be enough for them to challenge for victory over any of the remaining 10 races. But if they can, Leclerc looks far more likely to do so than Hamilton.

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