Charles Leclerc: Ferrari’s best shot at 2025 F1 victory comes at these three grands prix

Charles Leclerc believes that the Azerbaijan, Singapore, and Las Vegas Grands Prix are the only remaining hopes for Ferrari to win a race this season. But he admits that the Maranello outfit still heads into those races as the third favourite.

This comes after the Monegasque driver finished the Italian Grand Prix in fourth in front of the Ferrari home crowd at the historic Monza circuit. After an intense battle with McLaren’s Oscar Piastri at the start of the race, Leclerc ultimately finished in the same position he started in. His team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who had started from 10th after taking a five-place grid penalty carried over from the Dutch Grand Prix, finished in sixth.

“Baku is a track I love, which I’ve been very strong at in the past, but then again, coming to the race, it’s a track where it’s also very easy to overtake, and if you don’t have the race pace in the race, you can definitely feel it,” Leclerc explained to Sky Sports F1 when he was asked if there were any other tracks where the team might have more hope of a race victory. 

“So that’s going to be tricky, but then you’ve got Singapore, where qualifying is very important and then the race is more difficult to overtake, and I love this track as well. So I think Singapore, maybe Baku and Las Vegas are the three tracks that maybe we are a bit closer to win a race, but that doesn’t mean we go there as the two favourites.
 
“I think we still go there as third favourites,” he said. “If Red Bull struggles for a reason, [we are] maybe a second force, but never the first one, so it’s always going to be quite uphill and difficult.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

Discussing the race at Monza as a whole, Leclerc explained that although it was a “nice battle” with Piastri, the McLaren “just had more pace” than he did.

“It was a nice battle. I felt like I was overtaking when he was doing a mistake, and he was overtaking me when I was doing a mistake, and they just had more pace than I did. I tried the things that I think wasn’t in the car and I lost the rear multiple times. That meant that I couldn’t hope for much better unfortunately, but I tried.
 
“I don’t have any regrets. Unfortunately, today the pace of the car was a little bit worse than what we expected.”

Photos from Italian GP – Race