Charles Leclerc has explained why he refrained from trying to copy Lewis Hamilton’s driving style when extracting the most out of Ferrari’s 2026 Formula 1 car was tricky.
As F1 switched to new regulations for this season, Leclerc sometimes struggled with the Scuderia’s SF-26. After the Monegasque noticeably outperformed team-mate Hamilton last year, their head-to-head has been a lot more balanced in 2026.
Looking at qualifying as the best way to evaluate pure performance, Hamilton is up 10-9, while Leclerc has been 0.023s faster on average – but that figure is skewed by the fact he didn’t set a time when he crashed out of Q3 at Barcelona.
This was during the period where Leclerc struggled the most. He was outqualified four times across the Canadian (grand prix and sprint), Monaco and Catalan rounds, while scoring just 16 points to Hamilton’s 64, due to what the 28-year-old described as “something that was extremely difficult to deal with on the car” in the Beyond The Grid podcast. This was compounded by a puzzling crash in his home race, which he blamed on brake supplier Brembo.
“When things don’t go well, like it did in Montreal and Monaco, it’s not only about the results,” Leclerc said. “For Barcelona, it was better. And Barcelona, of course, in qualifying, I have no excuses. That’s just me pushing the limit too much and too far.
“Of course, I was disappointed, but the feeling was there. So when the feeling is there, you are a lot more confident as a driver. But Montreal and Monaco, the feeling was really not there. Like, whatever the result I will have done on the Sunday, I didn’t really care about this.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
“What’s important for me is that when I get into the car, I get the right feeling and I know that I can do my job properly by driving just naturally and not overthinking things.
“And so when you’ve got two races consecutive where things are getting tough and you don’t have the feeling, you’ve got two options, really. One is to try and find a way around with the set-up and with the car and trying to fit your natural driving style more. The other is just change your driving style.
“And in my case, I have Lewis as a team-mate, who was having incredible form – and who is in incredible form – so I knew that his driving style was working. Surely it was working,” Leclerc continued, speaking ahead of the Italian Grand Prix. “So I still had that option on trying. And I push on the word ‘trying’ because it’s always difficult to try and reproduce a driving style.
“It’s not as easy as, ‘Oh, Lewis is doing that, I’ll just do the same’. 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. And so to reproduce that is very tricky.
“I tried to push more into trying to find ways to have this car a bit more fitted to my driving style. And I found a few things in the data that were just not working.
“Again, in Formula 1, it’s not always black and white. 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 and we’ll gain one tenth’. It’s not as easy as that. It’s intuition, it’s feeling, it’s things that you might think, ‘Okay, this is what makes me a bit less comfortable in the car, and if I improve that feeling, then performance will come’.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Photo by: Madring
“And so I saw two, three things on the Friday night in Silverstone, changed those for the Saturday in qualifying, and the feeling was a lot better and even better than it was in Barcelona. And from that moment, I felt it went towards the right direction.”
Leclerc’s Silverstone breakthrough saw him qualify on the front row for the British Grand Prix, 0.175s down on Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli and 0.172s ahead of Hamilton. The Ferrari racer took the lead at the start and dominated the race to clinch his first victory since 2024.
A switch to Carbone Industrie brake discs is understood to have contributed to Leclerc’s upturn in form, which wasn’t a case of returning to the feeling he had at the Melbourne season opener, where he had claimed an encouraging podium finish.
“The car is constantly changing, so it’s not like I can really go back to that feeling I had in Melbourne. It’s evolving,” Leclerc clarified.
“But my goal is to get into the car and not overthink. 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. It’s more about anticipating and feeling the car yours. I mean, getting into a corner, I need to know exactly the way the car will behave so I don’t have to overthink about things.”
Leclerc has been the third-highest scorer since over the latest six rounds, going back to his Silverstone win, with 88 points to Antonelli’s 121 and Lando Norris’ 107; his record is tarnished by his early Monza crash only, as he finished every other race in the top five.
Meanwhile, Hamilton has scored just 66 over that period, though he was taken out of the Madring race by brake issues.
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– The Autosport.com Team
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