Charles Leclerc can still describe the last laps of his 2019 Italian Grand Prix win with the precision of a man replaying it in his head every year around this time. “The emotions in the last few laps, exactly the same like in 2019,” he told Motorsport.com ahead of this weekend’s race at Monza. “Just watching the grandstands inside of the track.” He was 21 years old that day, a rookie Ferrari winner standing on a podium that turned him into a national hero overnight in a country that had waited nine years for a home victory. He has chased that feeling every September that has followed.
“It was very difficult to find the words to describe what I felt,” Leclerc said of that afternoon. “I had a lot of pressure. The whole team had a lot of pressure, and obviously we were in Italy, and Ferrari is huge in Italy.” Standing on that podium, he has said elsewhere, gave him chills. Six years and one team principal change later, he still treats Monza as separate from every other race on the calendar, a weekend where the sport’s usual logic about pace and points gives way to something closer to belief.
Why Monza Refuses to Behave Like Other Races
Leclerc is careful not to call himself the favorite this weekend. Ferrari’s SF-26 has closed the gap to the front-running cars in recent races without fully erasing it, and Monza’s low-downforce demands reward a package Ferrari has not always trusted at high speed. But favorite status has rarely been the point for Leclerc at this circuit. He has finished on the Monza podium multiple times in the years that followed his 2019 breakthrough, and the tifosi treat every one of his laps there as a referendum on whether the team’s home race can still deliver a home win.
Monza’s layout makes the stakes sharper than at almost any other stop on the calendar. The circuit rewards raw straight-line speed and punishes drag, forcing teams to strip their cars down to a configuration unlike anything they run elsewhere. Ferrari has occasionally struggled to trust that low-downforce setup at a track where a single mistake in Parabolica or the second Lesmo can end a weekend in the gravel in front of the team’s own supporters. Getting that balance right counts for more at Monza than a strong result would suggest on paper: a driver who looks fast in practice but nervous in traffic gets picked apart in a crowd that notices everything.
“That’s what makes Ferrari unique,” Leclerc said, describing the wall of red that fills the grandstands every year regardless of the standings. “It goes beyond generations.” He called the connection between the team and its fans something that “goes beyond logic,” language he does not use loosely about a sport built on lap times and telemetry. Ask Leclerc to explain Monza in engineering terms and he will give you an answer. Ask him what it means, and the answer changes register entirely.
Betting on Vasseur’s Rebuild
The interview arrived at a pointed moment for Ferrari’s title hopes. Lewis Hamilton and Leclerc have both spoken about the strain of representing the sport’s most scrutinized team through a season that has not delivered a championship fight, and Monza traditionally magnifies that scrutiny rather than easing it. Leclerc used the platform to affirm his confidence in team principal Fred Vasseur directly, at a point in the season when speculation about Ferrari’s leadership tends to spike regardless of results.
That confidence is not blind loyalty. Vasseur has overseen incremental upgrades to the SF-26 through the back half of the season, chasing a car capable of matching McLaren and Mercedes rather than simply keeping pace with them. Leclerc’s public backing reads as a driver choosing to stake his own reputation on a project still mid-build, rather than distancing himself from a leadership team under pressure. For a driver who has spent parts of his Ferrari career doing exactly the opposite in rough patches, the timing of that endorsement lands heavily ahead of a race where every word gets amplified by a home crowd desperate for reasons to believe.
It also reflects a longer arc in how Leclerc has handled leadership churn at Ferrari. He has now worked under multiple team principals over his eight seasons at Ferrari, each one promising the structural fixes needed to end the championship drought, and each one leaving Leclerc to explain to Italian media why this time would be different. Choosing to back Vasseur publicly, by name, in the week of Ferrari’s most scrutinized race, is not something Leclerc has always done for predecessors under similar pressure. That distinction says something about how much stability he believes Vasseur has actually built beneath the results.
Racing Alongside Hamilton, Not Against Him
Leclerc’s Monza comments also arrive inside a delicate relationship with his new teammate. Lewis Hamilton joined Ferrari this season carrying seven world championships and a level of scrutiny no teammate in Leclerc’s career has matched. The two have navigated a season of mutual respect layered over the obvious tension of two elite drivers sharing one garage at the sport’s most watched team, and both have publicly acknowledged the strain of representing Ferrari through a year that has not delivered the fight either wanted. Leclerc’s willingness to speak so openly about what Monza means to him, rather than building his answer around beating Hamilton or defending his status as Ferrari’s long-standing lead driver, suggests a driver more focused on the team’s collective project than on internal hierarchy.
That is a departure from how Ferrari’s driver pairings have played out in the past. Previous teammate rivalries at the team have occasionally curdled into open friction when results disappointed, with blame shifting between drivers and garages rather than staying focused on the car. Leclerc choosing to spend a pre-Monza interview discussing his bond with the circuit and his faith in Vasseur, rather than positioning himself against Hamilton, reads as a deliberate choice about where he wants the team’s energy directed heading into its most pressurized weekend of the year.
A Race That Means More Than Points
Ferrari’s last drivers’ championship came in 2007, a drought stretching nearly two decades that has outlasted three team principals and dozens of driver lineups. Leclerc, now in his eighth season with the team, has become the figure most associated with the project’s modern era, the driver who gave the tifosi their most recent taste of what a Monza win feels like and the one still standing on the grid trying to build toward the next one.
That drought is also why Leclerc’s answer resists the usual angle reporters bring to Monza week. Every year, the questions arrive the same way: can Ferrari finally win the championship, can this be the year the drought ends, is the pressure of a home race with this much history too much for any driver to carry. Leclerc’s response, rooted in a specific memory of grandstands and chills rather than points and probabilities, sidesteps that angle entirely. He is not selling a championship case built on this weekend’s odds. He is describing why he still wants to be the one trying.
Whatever happens on Sunday, Leclerc’s answer about what Monza means to him suggests the calculation is not purely about championship math. It is about a 21-year-old’s best afternoon replaying itself every year in the same grandstands, in front of the same sea of red, with a team he has chosen, publicly and repeatedly, to keep believing in.
Other drivers on the grid have described Monza as an occasion to survive rather than enjoy, a weekend where the crowd’s expectations turn every mistake into a national story. Leclerc has chosen a different relationship with that pressure. Instead of treating the crowd as a burden, he treats it as the reason the result carries any real significance in the first place. That is the version of Monza he keeps returning to in interviews year after year: not the technical breakdown of downforce levels and tire strategy, but the memory of a grandstand rising to its feet for a 21-year-old who had just given it something to believe in. Six years on, he is still chasing those last few laps.
