Charles Leclerc has revealed that he has had to change his driving style “quite a lot” in order to extract the peak potential from Ferrari’s capricious 2025 Formula 1 car.
Ferrari has endured a sobering start to the season as a single podium in the opening five rounds has consigned the team to fourth in the Constructors’ Championship.
The Italian marque’s woes with a troubled SF-25 machine have exacerbated Lewis Hamilton’s attempt to get up to speed since his long-awaited move from Mercedes.
Hamilton hasn’t beaten Leclerc in a main race and a chastening 30-second gap between the two in Saudi Arabia inspired him to claim he is expecting a “painful” 2025.
But while he has pinpointed his team-mate’s extensive experience with Ferrari as a factor in the deficit, Leclerc has quashed the notion that the car suits his demands.
Leclerc, now in his seventh campaign with Ferrari, divulged that he has had to adopt radical set-up avenues to unlock more pace from the SF-25 in its current iteration.
“It’s always very difficult to compare drivers’ feeling, because if you don’t feel at ease, there’s always something that you struggle with more than the other driver, that’s why you can’t go as fast,” Leclerc told select media including Motorsport Week in Miami.
“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.
“However, there might be things that, it’s been seven years that I’ve been with Ferrari, so there are most likely things that are also very natural to me now, after so many years with the team that I don’t realise enough, even though I feel like I’ve been driving quite differently this year, just because this car requires a different setup and a different way of driving.”
How Leclerc has sustained Ferrari upturn
Elaborating on the direction that he has taken in recent events, Leclerc explained that he has set the car up to be aligned with his preference to have a sharp front end.
However, the Monegasque has recognised that his compromise might not deliver the positive results that he has encountered to date across all circuit configurations.
“I’m not obviously going to go too much into details, 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,” he expanded. “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 that we are going through at the moment.
“The last races have been paying off, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will pay off for every race, and so we still need to keep that open-minded approach, and make sure that we can reverse just in case we need to.
“But 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, I really like that direction.”
READ MORE – Charles Leclerc urges Ferrari not to give up on 2025 until F1 title dream is impossible
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