Charles Leclerc's Commitment to Ferrari: Faith in Fred Vasseur

Charles Leclerc has ridden out enough storms in red to know when something feels right. Amid a bruising run of form at the start of 2026 – two DNFs in three races and only eighth in Monaco – he chose that exact moment to double down on Ferrari and sign a new multi-year deal.

On paper, it looked an odd time to commit. On the inside, he says there was no hesitation.

“It just felt right,” Leclerc explained on F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast. “For me, this is where I belong, for now. This is where I feel good. This is where I am the most motivated to do well, just because I love this team so much.”

He has lived inside the Ferrari universe for years, first as a member of the academy, then as a race driver from 2019. The dream has never changed: win a World Championship in red. The route there, though, has rarely been smooth.

The Vasseur factor

One man, Leclerc admits, tipped the scales decisively: Team Principal Fred Vasseur.

“Fred is a big reason why I have signed again as well. I believe in Fred 200 percent,” he said. “We’ve known each other for many years now and to be able to work with him in the team I’ve always loved is a privilege.”

This is not a polite nod to the boss. Their relationship goes back long before Ferrari, and Leclerc talks about Vasseur with the ease of someone describing family rather than management.

“It feels like I know Fred since forever,” he added. “He’s the kind of person that you speak once and, I don’t know, I think it’s the values. There’s just something that was naturally working from the beginning and you cannot quite explain that.”

That connection has become the emotional spine of his decision. Leclerc believes in the project, but he also believes in the person leading it.

“I believe in every single person of the team,” he said. “I think 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.”

Hope alone doesn’t win titles. Yet for Leclerc, the sense that Ferrari is pushing hard, changing, innovating, is enough to convince him that walking away now would mean abandoning the very goal he set when he first pulled on the red overalls.

“I don’t want to give up on my ultimate goal, which is to become a World Champion with Ferrari,” he said. There was no caveat, no hint of doubt.

Hamilton flying, Leclerc searching

While Leclerc wrestled with DNFs and a stubborn car, Lewis Hamilton was turning the same machinery into podiums. Two second places in Canada and Monaco, then a landmark first Ferrari win in Barcelona. Same team, same garage wall, very different scoreboard.

That contrast cut deep.

“It's not as easy as, ‘Oh, Lewis is doing that. I'll just do the same,’” Leclerc admitted. “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.”

Copying Hamilton, then, was never going to be the answer. The car needed to come to Leclerc, not the other way round.

“I tried to push more into trying to find ways to have this car a bit more fitted to my driving style,” he said. The data held clues, but not a magic switch. “I found a few things in the data that was just not working. Again, in Formula 1, it's not always black and white.”

He knows better than most that numbers on a screen only tell part of the story.

“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.”

The pressure finally told at Silverstone, but in the right way. Leclerc and Ferrari made changes that weekend, and he drove the car to victory. The tweaks weren’t a silver bullet, but they pointed in the “right direction” and, crucially, helped clear his head.

“The car is constantly changing so it's not like I can really go back to that feeling I had in Melbourne, so it's evolving,” he said. “My goal is to get into the car and not overthink.”

The war on overthinking

For Leclerc, the mental side has become as important as any new front wing.

“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,” he said. “It's more about anticipating and feeling the car.”

He wants to arrive at the braking zone already knowing exactly how the car will respond. No second-guessing. No delay.

“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 explained. “I think overthinking is killing performance.”

What he’s chasing is that elusive “flow state” drivers and athletes talk about, where instinct takes over and performance spikes.

“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,” he said. “When you've got to overthink things, that’s where it becomes trickier.”

The Silverstone win suggested he is edging back towards that zone, just as Ferrari’s season enters its decisive stretch.

Can Ferrari really hunt down Mercedes?

On the Constructors’ table, Ferrari sit second, but a long way back. Mercedes hold an 87-point cushion, a margin that underlines the size of the task rather than ending the conversation.

Leclerc knows the arithmetic. He also knows how volatile this era of F1 can be.

“This championship will be won with upgrades,” he said. “The upgrades are so powerful with these cars.”

The current regulations have stripped away downforce compared to the past. That has made every development step more dramatic.

“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,” he explained. “So the pecking order can change so quickly one way or another.”

Predicting whether Ferrari can genuinely reel in Mercedes? He’s not wasting energy on that.

“It's not something I really want to put energy towards thinking about too much,” he said. “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.”

Yet the belief is still there, stubborn and familiar.

“Surely until it's not finished, I'll keep believing in it and we'll see how it goes,” he added.

The dream, though, is bigger than one season.

“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,” Leclerc said. “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: Ferrari, Vasseur, and the long, hard road to a title in red. Now the question is simple and brutal – will the project rise fast enough to match the faith of the driver who has just committed the prime of his career to it?