Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will be team-mates at Ferrari in 2025
Charles Leclerc has laid down his marker ahead of his partnership with Lewis Hamilton, telling Sky Italia “never” will he be in a situation where his team-mate is fighting for the title “instead of me”.
This season the Ferrari stalwart has a new team-mate in Hamilton as the Briton has replaced Carlos Sainz after signing a multi-year contract with the Scuderia.
Charles Leclerc said ‘never my team-mate fighting instead of me’
The new partnership has pundits and fans salivating, not only to see who comes out on top in the intra-team battle but because it could determine who wins Ferrari’s first Drivers’ Championship title since Kimi Raikkonen’s 2007 success.
It is a storyline that is expected to define the F1 2025 championship.
Interestingly it is one that Leclerc began writing when he was a junior under Massimo Rivola’s leadership of Ferrari’s Driver Academy and the now-eight-time Grand Prix winner made his stance on team-mates and World titles abundantly clear.
Speaking on the Lo Stagista podcast in 2022, Sky Italy commentator Carlo Vanzini shared a conversation he had with Leclerc that began with the question of how he earned his moniker ‘Il Predestinato’.
Vanzini revealed: “First of all, it became popular when he won in Monza. I used it in Spa for his first victory, but I had already used it back when he was in Alfa Romeo.
“This is because it was born from a meeting when he was maybe 15 years old. Because the former person in charge, Massimo Rivola, chose to give him take a communication class and he brought [Charles] to Sky.
“So we had this meeting and then we had a kind of press conference and there I asked him: ‘Today you start from pole, your team-mate fights for the title, what will you do?’
“[Leclerc responded] ‘I drive to win, so I’ll drive to win my race.’
“This answer to us was perfect because we’d talked with him countless times. But for you [the team], not as good of an answer, because it surely generates controversy: He won’t help his team-mate!
“So, the answer ‘I drive to win, when the time comes to help my team-mate or my team asks me certain things, I’m obviously available for the team’ – this is the answer that is less exciting for us, but you [the team] can accept without issues.”
However, Leclerc didn’t let it rest there as he approached Vanzini after the mock interview.
“Then this kid,” Vanzini continued, “when we get out, follows me and tells me, ‘It was the question that was wrong because it will never be possible that we end up fighting for the title and it’s my team-mate fighting for it instead of me.’”
Hamilton though has joined Ferrari with the intension of winning his elusive eighth World title, a title team principal Fred Vasseur believes Ferrari can fight for this season.
“Yeah,” he told Sky F1 when that question was put to him. “If you have a look at this season [2024], I think Charles scored the biggest number of points after Monza, or something like this when we started to react and started to do a better job on our side.
“It means that everything is possible, it’s just a matter to put everything together to minimise the number of mistakes.
“It’s true that on this season, the long season, 24 events that we have always up and down. But what is positive for us is that we had a tough journey around June, July, and as a team, we were able to react and to react quickly. And this is encouraging.”
