Charles Leclerc changing driving style amid “extreme” set-up changes on Ferrari F1 car

The closest Charles Leclerc has been to the winner of a grand prix at the chequered flag this season has been 8.104 seconds.

Even that margin, for his third-place finish last time out in Saudi Arabia, is something of an outlier in the opening five rounds of 2025  – fourth place and nearly 20s off the lead in Bahrain, a distant and subsequently disqualified fifth in China, to name but two.

The SF-25’s close-but-no-cigar race pace, and Lewis Hamilton’s manifest difficulties adapting to the car’s behaviour, render Hamilton’s victory in the China sprint all the more inexplicable.

While Leclerc has enjoyed an advantage in terms of being accustomed to ‘baked in’ car characteristics, such as the engine braking which has been giving Hamilton so much trouble, even he has had to adapt and compromise.

As the ground-effect rule set matures, performance gains have been more challenging to find, and the result has been narrower gaps between the leading cars – and several drivers reporting their machinery has developed bothersome vices at the limit.

“It’s always very difficult to compare drivers’ feelings,” Leclerc said ahead of this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, “because if you don’t feel at ease, there’s always something that you struggle with more than the other driver, and that’s why you can’t go as fast.

“On my side, this year we’ve gone in quite extreme directions in terms of set-up in order to extract a bit more out of the car, so I feel like I’m changing quite a lot of my driving style in order to fit the new requirements from this car.”

The Suzuka race, round three of 2025, was the turning point. That was where Leclerc first adopted the set-up approach he describes as “more extreme”, based on a feeling he said he’d had for a long time.

Not that he is minded to elucidate about what that entails.

“I’m not obviously going to go too much into details,” he said, “but it just makes the car a little bit trickier – very, very pointy, and that’s quite tricky to drive, especially when you are on the limit in qualifying, but it’s something that I like, that I’ve always liked in my career.

“But it takes a few races in order to readapt everything around the car, in order to go into that direction, which is the process we’re going through at the moment, that in the last races have been paying off.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will pay off for every race, so we still need to keep that open-minded approach and make sure that we can reverse just in case we need to.

“We are still exploring in that direction and still pushing into that direction, because for now we are only seeing benefits, at least on my side.”

By ‘pointier’ he means a stronger front end coming with the inherent compromise of the rear end being slightly twitchy. The car turns in more eagerly but also has a propensity to oversteer.

Since Leclerc admits to being understeer-averse, this is actually a set-up direction from which he can derive a benefit – so long as he can keep the rear end under control.

This would also explain why Hamilton hasn’t seen the same benefits despite evaluating a broadly similar setup: the seven-time champion prefers a predictable and firmly planted rear axle.

For the past two grands prix that has left him half a second slower in qualifying than Leclerc – and in the current environment that equates to several grid positions.

While a narrative has been gaining momentum that Hamilton will struggle all year, it remains possible that the phased upgrade package Ferrari will begin introducing at the next round in Imola will mitigate some of that rear-end instability.

Leclerc not only backs his team-mate to make the jump, he suggests the fresh perspective Hamilton brings from another working environment is helping the Scuderia.

“I think it’s always very tricky when you get and join a new team to get on with the new systems, with the new way of working, with the new car,” he said of Hamilton, who joined Ferrari for 2025 after 12 seasons with Mercedes

“So, obviously on my side I’m fully focused on myself and trying to extract the maximum out of myself, out of the car, and that already requires a lot of work. But I’m sure Lewis will get there and honestly he got such a great win in China.

“There’s still a lot to learn, but I already learned a lot from Lewis. So, it’s great to have him in the team and to challenge the way we’ve done things for many, many years – and also give a fresh view on how we approach different things.

“On that we’ve learned a lot already.”

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