Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari gamble: why he signed again after 7 seasons without a title

Charles Leclerc has gone 7 seasons at Ferrari without a title, and on 3 June 2026 he signed up for more. In Monaco race week, Ferrari announced a multi-year renewal: 2 years to the end of 2028, Sky Sports reported, “potentially more”.

4 days later, at his home race, he crashed at the final corner on the restart after a safety car and retired. On 5 July he won Silverstone. It was his 9th career win, his first since 2024, and Ferrari’s 250th in Formula 1, Reuters reported.

Those 5 weeks sum up his time at Ferrari pretty well. The case against staying is long. He stayed for 3 reasons.

The case against: a 7-year charge sheet

The problems started in his second race for the team. Leclerc was leading comfortably in Bahrain in 2019 when a short circuit in an injection-system control unit stopped a cylinder, and he limped home 3rd. He was 21.

The charge sheet, 2019–2023

Race	What happened	Result
Bahrain 2019	Engine fault while leading	3rd
Monaco 2021	Driveshaft failure from pole	Did not start
Spain 2022	Power unit failure from the lead	Retired
Azerbaijan 2022	Power unit failure from the lead	Retired
Monaco 2022	Strategy error in the wet	4th
Britain 2022	Missed a stop under the safety car	4th
France 2022	Spun out of the lead, lap 18	Retired
USA 2023	Excessive skid block wear	Disqualified
Brazil 2023	Crashed on the formation lap	Did not start

Source: Wikipedia — Charles Leclerc

Monaco 2021 was worse. He took pole at home, then crashed on his final qualifying run. Ferrari inspected the gearbox and cleared it on Sunday morning, but the left driveshaft hub, damaged in the same crash, was not checked. It failed on the way to the grid and he didn’t start.

2022 should have been the year. The F1-75 was quick, Leclerc won in Bahrain and Australia, and he left Melbourne 34 points clear of George Russell and 46 ahead of Max Verstappen.

Then his power unit failed while he was leading in Barcelona, and again in Baku. In Monaco he led in the wet before a strategy error dropped him to 4th. At Silverstone he missed the free pit stop under the safety car that team-mate Carlos Sainz took, and finished 4th again. At Paul Ricard he spun out of the lead and into the barrier on lap 18, and that one was his own error.

In 2023 he was disqualified in Austin for excessive skid block wear, along with Lewis Hamilton. In Brazil an electronic command fault shut down the power unit and hydraulics on the formation lap and put him in the wall before the race started.

Engines, strategy calls, a missed inspection and his own mistakes have all cost him at different points.

Why the wins make it worse

If that were the whole story, leaving would have been an easy call. But the good days have kept coming, just often enough to make it harder.

Leclerc’s Grand Prix wins by season at Ferrari

20192

20200

20210

20223

20230

20243

20250

Source: Wikipedia — Charles Leclerc

In 2019, his first season at Ferrari, he won at Spa and Monza and took the FIA Pole Trophy for the most poles, ahead of 4-time champion team-mate Sebastian Vettel. In 2020, the season after Ferrari reached a confidential settlement with the FIA over its power unit, he still took 2 podiums in the SF1000.

In 2024 he won 3 races, Monaco among them. That came after he signed in January to stay “beyond the 2024 season”, a week before Ferrari announced that Hamilton would join in 2025.

2025 brought no Ferrari wins at all. Leclerc managed 7 podiums and a pole in Hungary, while Hamilton became the team’s first new driver in 44 years to finish a season without a podium.

That pattern is what makes it hard to leave. A plain slump is easy to walk away from. Years of real pace, repeated failures and the odd win are harder, because the next win always looks close. Silverstone 2026 came a month after he signed.

Reason one: he trusts Fred Vasseur

The clearest answer comes from Leclerc himself. Frédéric Vasseur ran ART Grand Prix when Leclerc won the GP3 title in 2016, and was Sauber’s team principal when Leclerc made his F1 debut there in 2018.

On F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast, published on 2 September 2026, Leclerc was direct about it.

“Fred is a big reason why I have signed again as well. I believe in Fred 200 percent.” — Charles Leclerc, Beyond The Grid, September 2026

The trust goes both ways. In Ferrari’s announcement, Vasseur said the team had watched him grow “to become not only one of the strongest drivers in Formula 1, but also a person who is completely at one with the team and everything Ferrari represents.”

Leclerc has worked with Vasseur since his junior career. He is betting that Vasseur can finish the job at Ferrari.

Reason two: a Ferrari title is the one he wants

By his own account, Leclerc knew what he wanted at 3 and a half, in his first kart. He joined the Ferrari Driver Academy in 2016, aged 18.

When the new deal was announced, he said Ferrari “has always been so much more than just a team to me. It’s the team I’ve loved and dreamt of being part of since I was a child.”

It’s easy to read that as sentiment, but it also tells you which title he’s chasing. Winning with another team would make him a world champion. Winning with Ferrari, whose last drivers’ title was Kimi Räikkönen’s in 2007, would make him the driver who ended the drought.

He has always been clear that he wants the second one. The same statement promised to “give absolutely everything I have to bring this team back to where it belongs, at the very top.”

Jean Alesi picked Ferrari for the same reason at the end of 1990, walking away from a signed Williams contract, and won 1 race in 201 starts.

There’s a fear-of-missing-out factor too. No driver who lived through 2022 would rule out leaving after 7 hard years and then watching Ferrari build a winning car the following season.

Reason three: the seats that mattered were taken

This is the least romantic reason, and possibly the strongest. Leclerc has confirmed he had offers from rival teams before signing, so he wasn’t short of options. The problem was where those options were.

Front-running seats for 2027

Team	Driver	Contract to
Red Bull	Max Verstappen	2030
Mercedes	George Russell	2027
Mercedes	Kimi Antonelli	2027
Ferrari	Charles Leclerc	end of 2028 at least

Source: Motor Sport Magazine — F1 2027 driver line-ups: latest contract news and rumours

Red Bull is built around Max Verstappen, whose contract now runs to the end of 2030. At Mercedes, Kimi Antonelli had won 5 of the first 7 Grands Prix of 2026 and led the standings, and Toto Wolff confirmed him and George Russell for 2027. A winning team that has just kept both its drivers has no seat to offer.

What Leclerc needed was some mix of works backing, prestige and a clear lead role. None of the open options offered all 3 the way Ferrari does.

2026 is also the first season of new power-unit rules, and Ferrari builds its own engine, so staying looks more like strategy than surrender. He knows the team’s flaws better than anyone outside Maranello, and he knows where the work is being done.

A calculated bet

It’s tempting to say Leclerc is addicted to the pain of Ferrari. The evidence doesn’t back that up.

British Grand Prix, 5 July 2026

Pos	Driver	Team	Gap
1	Charles Leclerc	Ferrari	—
2	George Russell	Mercedes	+0.427 s
3	Lewis Hamilton	Ferrari	+0.772 s

Source: Formula1.com — 2026 British Grand Prix race result

His 3 reasons are trust in Vasseur, what a Ferrari title would mean to him, and the plain fact that no better seat was available. Put together, he’s betting that his speed and his faith in the team can make the difference this time.

It’s still a gamble, and he’s staking the best years of his career on it. He may have got it wrong. Or he may simply value the chance of a title in red more than a title anywhere else.

June and July 2026 showed both sides of the deal he signed up for: a crash at Monaco 4 days after he put pen to paper, then a win at Silverstone a month later.