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When Charles Leclerc joined Ferrari for the 2019 season, it was against the backdrop of a rookie season in Formula One with Sauber, whose power units were supplied by Ferrari at the time, in which he beat his more experienced teammate, Marcus Ericsson.
A seat in Scuderia Ferrari is highly coveted and in his mind, it's likely that he was humbled by the opportunity to drive alongside four-time world champion, Sebastian Vettel, while at the same time thinking of how he would push himself to the limit in the new team.
Leclerc's father, Herve Leclerc, played a big role in setting him up for a motorsport career. Herve himself was in motorsport and introduced his son to the adrenaline-filled sport at a tender age. Leclerc went on to shine, becoming a champion in karting, GP3 and Formula 2. Leclerc has come of age since he graduated from Ferrari's Drivers' Academy.
Ferrari was quick to establish the 'rules' for 2019. Leclerc was to play second fiddle to Vettel.
If he was to outshine the German, he had to do it through the longer route of having to overcome team decisions that favoured his teammate. At the season's opening race in Australia, Leclerc finished fifth, 1.1 seconds behind his teammate. Over to Bahrain next where the Monegasque lay down the marker for his intentions of 2019. He got pole ahead of his more illustrious teammate.
During the race, Vettel got a better start than Leclerc and soon afterwards, the new man at Ferrari dropped another position to Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas. He had struggled to warm his tyres but when he got his act together, he overtook Bottas in the second lap. Leclerc was more than two seconds behind Vettel but caught up with and passed the German in the sixth lap.
From then on, he was in clean air and opened a comfortable lead. Luck was, however, not on his side as a loss of power gave Mercedes the chance to snatch victory in a race which they believed they had lost. An error by Vettel after being overtaken by Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton on the 38th lap saw him take a spin and drop from third to ninth before recovering to fifth. Though not his first win in Formula One after coming agonizingly close, Leclerc got his first ever podium on the main stage.
The drama and adrenaline at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir proved to be a microcosm of how the rest of the season would play out.
Vettel had more errors by the end of the season compared to Leclerc. The Monegasque had more wins than the German, got more than triple the poles that Vettel mastered, had more podiums and managed to create a cushion of 24 points against the four-time world champion. Leclerc's fourth place finish in the drivers' standings was 14 points behind Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
Assuming Leclerc had won the Bahrain Grand Prix, finished in the top five at his home race in Monaco (a strategic blunder by the team meant that he had a shock Q1 exit) and finished fourth in Brazil where he was taken out by his teammate, there's no doubt that he would have finished the season ahead of Verstappen. The seven poles by Leclerc, the most by anyone in 2019, are likely to have convinced Ferrari that they're getting things right in the bid to catch up with Mercedes.
Leclerc did win his first Formula One race at Spa, in Belgium in his 13th race with the Italian team. It came on the fourth race after he was famously shoved aside by Verstappen at the exhilarating Austrian Grand Prix. Watching Leclerc after Austria, he was a man on a mission and one who quickly learnt the boundaries of proper, hard and fair racing, which he applied in subsequent races.
Ferrari's management has been reluctant to give Leclerc the credit he is due, a case in point being the failure to apportion blame on any of the drivers following the twin crash in Brazil caused by Vettel, that ended the race for both cars.
But Leclerc's consistency, raw pace, brilliant race craft and sheer talent in qualifying have proved to the bosses at the topmost echelons of Scuderia Ferrari that the Monegasque is no pushover and that he should be left to fly without constraints.
