Charles Leclerc E-Book

Adam Hay-Nicholls

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 314

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

From acclaimed journalist Adam Hay-Nicholls, the very first biography of rising star Charles Leclerc, published to mark the start of the 2023 Formula One season. Few of the drivers on the F1 grid have the racing pedigree of Charles Leclerc. Widely regarded as one of the sport's hottest prospects, he was crowned F3 and then F2 champion in back-to-back seasons before he made his F1 debut with Sauber in 2018. Now firmly established as Ferrari's great hope, following in the footsteps of legends Alberto Ascari, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher, Leclerc has his eyes set on becoming world champion. Born in Monaco to a family of comparatively modest means, Leclerc remembers playing with toy cars on a friend's balcony as the best drivers in the world whizzed around the Monte Carlo circuit on the streets below. This early experience inspired him to get behind the wheel, encouraged by his father Hervé, and so began his meteoric rise in the sport. Along the way, he lost his father, his godfather and his best friend - all racing drivers - and this gave Leclerc the inner steel to become a winner. Writer Adam Hay-Nicholls, who has spent much of his career in the Formula One paddock, provides the inside track on this rising star, recounting how he has taken the racing world by storm. And as Leclerc's Ferrari is beginning to fire on all cylinders, will he beat his old rival and adversary Max Verstappen to the world title?

Leseprobe

Adam Hay-Nicholls has been a Formula One journalist since 2005. He has been the F1 correspondent for the UK’s Metro newspaper since 2006, and additionally writes for titles including GQ, Country Life,the Spectator and The Sunday Times.

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-008-7

ebook: 978-183773-009-4

Text copyright © 2023 Adam Hay-Nicholls

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK.

CONTENTS

Prologue

1The Little Principality

2The Mentor

3In the Name of the Father

4The Debutant

5Cavallino Rampante

6In the Red

7For Anthoine

8Life in the Fast Lane

9Where Did All the Prancing Horses Go?

10Team Leader

11Pass the Dutch

12Should’ve Been a Contender

Epilogue

Charles Leclerc Professional Racing Record

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

The leaden silence was punctured by the jet engine of a Belgian Air Force F-16. On the Spa-Francorchamps start line, the twenty grand prix drivers had been joined by their young Formula 2 comrades along with the top brass from both series to honour Anthoine Hubert, a 22-year-old F2 hot shot who had been killed in an horrendous crash at the circuit just 24 hours earlier.

Stoically, Anthoine’s mother and brother fought back their tears while others in the congregation reached for tissues. When the minute’s silence was up, applause rippled along the grid and around the Ardennes. People hugged and clapped and wiped their eyes. The national anthem was sung wistfully in acapella, and overhead a fighter jet crossed the pale cloudy sky. It was back to business as usual.

One of the most challenging, fast and thrilling racetracks ever devised, Spa-Francorchamps held its first Belgian Grand Prix in 1925. Forty-eight drivers’ and riders’ lives have been cut short on this tarmac in the years since. Hubert’s name was added to a list that includes all-time greats Richard ‘Dick’ Seaman (killed in 1939) and Stefan Bellof (1985).

Since the turn of the 21st century, racers and fans have let their guards down. Contemporary car and track safety have made fatalities rare. The vast majority of the time, following an accident that would have killed or crippled a driver 30 years ago, the modern racing driver leaps from the wreckage and sprints back to the pits with nothing but bruised pride and a bunch of excuses. Yet occasionally, they still can pay the ultimate price.

It takes tremendous inner steel and an ability to block out fear and emotion to strap into a racing car and take to a track that killed your friend hours earlier. To drive those corners flat-out, defend from attack and achieve one’s greatest result an hour and a half after standing for a minute’s silence for that childhood buddy requires a rare psychology.

Competitors in the 1920s and through the subsequent few decades spent their formative years in times of war. They grew up with danger and a sense of fatalism and glory. They raced cars in the absence of keys to a Sopwith, a Spitfire or a Messerschmitt. Putting their lives on the line was the point. That was the buzz. Today, that’s a distant memory. Racing drivers grow up with PlayStations, and the ones who can afford the journey up the racing ladder want for very little. They appear to have blessed lives. Few have faced hardship, yet a handful have suffered personal setbacks. Charles Leclerc’s inner steel has been forged in grief, and it gees him to push harder.

On the Spa starting grid, having hugged the loved ones of his fallen friend, Leclerc slid into the cockpit of his scarlet Ferrari SF90, clipped in, fired up and pulled away on the formation lap, leading the field past the spot at Raidillon where Hubert suffered his accident. Taking his pole position slot, Charles stared up at the starting gantry, waiting for the five red lights to appear and extinguish. One, two, three, four, five, pause …

His heart was hammering, adrenalin coursing through his veins. He’d visualised this start a hundred times, but Anthoine’s visage kept flickering in his mind. He needed to block out the crash; he needed to dismiss any sadness that might make him vulnerable. He needed to take his sorrow and, with furious alchemy, turn this energy into speed. He didn’t just want to win this race, he needed to win it to overcome his emotions and give Anthoine a fitting tribute. It would require all of his skill, faith and focus, because until 1 September 2019 Charles Leclerc had never won a grand prix.

That afternoon, he resisted pressure from seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton to clinch an inspiring inaugural victory. He maintained radio silence throughout the 44 laps until he crossed the finish line when he said to his Ferrari pit wall and the 90 million fans listening: ‘This one’s for Antoine.’

1

THE LITTLE PRINCIPALITY

To the world, Monaco is the jewel in the crown of Formula One. To Charles Leclerc, it’s home. At the time of his birth at the Princess Grace Hospital on Thursday 16 October 1997, Ferrari flags fluttered on high-rise balcony railings throughout the principality. Michael Schumacher had just won the Japanese Grand Prix for the Italian marque, and F1 was just a week away from a memorable championship showdown between the German and Williams’ Jacques Villeneuve. Schumacher had triumphed in the wet on these Riviera streets four months earlier; one of his most brilliant performances for the Scuderia to date. Monaco, and the sport as a whole, had gone Ferrari mad.

The inaugural Monaco Grand Prix was held in 1929 with the blessing of Prince Louis II, who saw it as an opportunity to put his tiny country on the map. He wanted it to be the most prestigious and profitable sub-square mile on the Mediterranean. Monaco also boasts the most famous casino in the world, the Beaux Arts Casino de Monte Carlo. James Bond visited twice, in Goldeneye and Never Say Never Again.It was built in 1865 to save the ruling House of Grimaldi from bankruptcy. To this day, the 8,000 Monégasques among the country’s 40,000 residents are forbidden from entering the casino’s gaming rooms. Monaco attracts wealthy blow-ins for its private banks and lack of income and estate tax, as well as a portfolio of fabulously glamorous hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, ruinously expensive nightclubs and a harbour crammed with mega-yachts that are collectively worth more than the GDP of Madagascar.

Monaco comprises nine individual districts, including the hill of Monte Carlo where one finds Casino Square; the rock of Monaco-Ville where the royal palace is located; and La Condamine, site of the racing pits and where the grand prix podium takes place. The apartments in Monte Carlo and beachside Larvotto, beyond the tunnel, fetch the highest prices, while almost all of the F1 drivers live in the quieter, more easy-going 1980s development of Fontvieille, built on land reclaimed from the sea, where there is a colourful marina and a handy heliport.

Since the early 1990s, most of the drivers on the F1 grid have chosen to live in Monaco. Arriving once they have secured their first big paycheque, usually a few years into their twenties, they are attracted to the weather, the transport links, the sports facilities, the cycling trails and, of course, the favourable tax status.

In contrast with the stylish surroundings, La Condamine is, architecturally, a hotch-potch of residential buildings and businesses, most of a post-war design that hasn’t aged terribly well. You won’t find any five-star hotels here.

La Condamine is home to the Leclercs. Monaco doesn’t do blue-collar neighbourhoods, but if it did La Condamine would be it. This is where the working population of Monaco lives, as opposed to the millionaires and billionaires stretched out on the arms of the principality either side of Port Hercules. There are no Gucci or Graff stores in La Condamine. The focal point is the Place d’Armes, where there’s a fruit and veg market and where the locals go to read their copies of Nice-Matin over an espresso or pastis. ‘I don’t live in the glamorous city that everyone sees during the Grand Prix,’ explains Charles. ‘It feels like a village to me. The people that are actually staying here the whole year are the real Monégasques, and we all know each other.’

Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc was born to parents Hervé and Pascale. Pascale works as a hairdresser in Fontvieille. Her clients include David Coulthard, who was racing for McLaren at the time of Charles’ birth. Charles has an older brother, Lorenzo, who was born in 1989 and has gone on to become an investment banker, while younger brother Arthur came along in 2000. Back in 1955, Charles’ maternal grandfather, Charles Manni, had founded a successful French manufacturing company producing plastic car parts, Mecaplast, which provided a comfortable life for his family. Today, Charles’ uncle Thierry Manni runs the company, now known as the Novares Group, with revenues of €1.2 billion per year. Nevertheless, Hervé and Pascale made their own way.

Like his father-in-law, Hervé worked in the plastics industry Monday to Friday, but dedicated much of his spare time to racing in French and European Formula 3 during the 1980s, when he was in his mid-twenties. However, he always struggled to come up with the funds necessary to secure a seat at this level, so his racing record was patchy; full season-long campaigns were rare, with a race here and a race there, driving the Volkswagen-powered Reynard 873 and 883 and the Alfa Romeo-powered Martini MK45 for low-budget teams. He competed on the streets of Monaco in 1986, 1987 and 1988, scoring eighth place on his last appearance. He recorded no wins during his racing career.

Charles’ first memory of Formula One was watching the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix, aged four, from the balcony of a family friend who lived nine storeys above the Beau Rivage, with views of the track out of Turn One, the swimming pool section and the harbour. To occupy himself, Charles was given a miniature toy Ferrari to play with on the tiled floor.

On the circuit’s start-finish straight is the bus stop from which he would travel to school. From kindergarten age through primary he attended the École de Fontvieille. Today, a portrait photo of Charles hangs on the wall of his old classroom. ‘He’s the pride of our school,’ says headteacher Hélène Palmero, ‘all the kids here would like to be Charles. I encouraged him to study by telling him these subjects would be useful once he became an F1 driver. Not that he really believed it … but I was fantasising. I was trying to motivate him.’

He first decided he wanted to become a racing driver when he was four, after he first witnessed the Monaco Grand Prix, and after he took a day off sick from school and accompanied his dad to a kart track owned by a friend. The Brignoles circuit was a couple of hours drive west of Monaco, in France’s Var region. It was a flat, fast, sinuous track, professionally maintained by Philippe Bianchi, 38-year-old Hervé Leclerc’s dearest mate. Philippe and his wife Christine had three kids, Melanie, Jules and Tom, and the two families were extremely close.

Tom was Charles’ best friend, while twelve-year-old Jules was his godfather. Jules had been karting since he was three and was dynamite. The family were hoping that he might progress from karts to single-seater car racing; a leap so few youngsters are actually able to realise.

On little Charles’ first experience of a kart he, too, took to it like a duck to water. Karting is the way every F1 driver starts, often when they are as young as three or four, and certainly before they hit double digits. Triple F1 world champion Ayrton Senna, who was killed in 1994’s San Marino Grand Prix at the peak of his powers, described karting as ‘the purest driving experience’, preferring it even to F1. Senna was and remains a hero to Charles, both for his race craft and also his philanthropy.

Philippe pulled Charles around the track with a rope tied between their two karts, to make sure he understood the basics. After half a lap, it was clear he did. The tether was untied and off he went. ‘Despite the fact that I was only four, this day is still in my memory,’ Charles remembers. ‘I was supposed to go to school that day. I wasn’t a huge fan of school though, so I pretended to be sick when I heard that my father was going to Brignoles. Curiously, my dad was happy that I couldn’t go to school. As soon as we arrived, I found myself in a kart. I came back from Brignoles dazzled, saying to my father that my future was clear: I will be a Formula One driver.’

On Wednesdays in Fontvieille, the school children were allowed into the nearby Louis II Stadium to play games on the hallowed turf of football club AS Monaco. Charles tried all sorts of sports. He enjoyed them, but he got bored quickly. This wasn’t true of motor sport, however. By age eight, Charles was ready to race, and his godfather, who was now sixteen and edging closer to his own goals, agreed to be his mechanic. Such was their brotherly bond, Charles even began to unconsciously adopt Jules’ mannerisms. In his first season of racing, he won the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regional championship, a title he held on to for four years. But his dad halted any chance of it going to his head. ‘When you’re seven years old and you win two races in a row, you think you’re unbeatable,’ Leclerc says. ‘My father told me to always be humble, even in good moments, and especially when you feel you are unbeatable.’

‘I’ve always said,’ recalled Philippe Bianchi, ‘that “the look” is the most important thing for a future driver, especially when the helmet is on. I’ve always seen this spark in Charles’ eyes just like in Jules’. A focused boy, motivated, sure about what he wanted, paying close attention to everything we were saying about him. Sometimes we had to say to his father that he needs to cool down and take it step by step, because every step is important. I found in Charles all the qualities I’d identified in Jules some years before. That’s why they have a similar path.’

But their weekends at Brignoles, amid the smell of two-stroke oil and barbeque, were always relaxed. ‘No one took themselves seriously,’ says Charles, ‘they were the best times. Everyone was friends with everyone, which is something I miss; going to the bar with my friends to drink orange juice because we were only eleven, then getting back in our karts. We had a 24-hour race, and I was in a team with Jules, my brother and Norman Nato [who went on to race in Formula 2, Formula E and the FIA World Endurance Championship]. It was around three in the morning when Jules said, “Charles, you do this next session of one hour and we will go and have a party and come back in an hour.” At eight in the morning, they still weren’t back. I didn’t want to stop because I didn’t want to lose first position, so I’d been driving for five straight hours and I was completely dead. Eventually they came back and saved me.’

By now, Charles had moved to ‘big school’. The Lycée Albert Premier has stood on the rock of Monaco-Ville since 1665. A wide peach-coloured building of four storeys with powder-blue window shutters, it had been a convent and a barracks before it became a teaching establishment in 1870. Lycée alumni include members of Monaco’s royal family and the scandal-tainted former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Leclerc excelled in mathematics and languages, which, as his earlier headmistress had surmised, would stand him in good stead. He was fluent in English and Italian, alongside his French mother tongue. And things were heating up on track as Charles began to race across southern Europe. He became the French Cadet champion in 2009 before moving up to the intercontinental KF3 class, using 100cc water-cooled engines, and winning the Junior Monaco Kart Cup. Having his school friends there to watch was a special thrill; he remains close with eight of his pals from the École de Fontvieille to this day, including two boys he was at kindergarten with. He was also making friends on the karting circuit, including a kid from Rouen called Pierre Gasly, Anglo-Thai youngster Alexander Albon from London and Anthoine Hubert from Chartres.

He was seeing more of the latter than he was his school chums. ‘My goal is to become the best,’ said Charles some years later. ‘You have to sacrifice a lot of things: You don’t see your friends, you don’t see your family. That begins from a very young age – from as early as nine or ten, you start to go it alone. I see it from the other side too. How many people would love to be in my place now, doing something that I loved and still love doing.’

In 2010, he graduated to the CIK-FIA World Cup for the KF3 class. Here there were some new faces, and even tougher competition; Esteban Ocon from Normandy and Max Verstappen from the Netherlands, whose father had been an F1 driver. Charles was the youngest competitor, and he was also struggling for financial backing.

Hervé was having difficulty bankrolling his son’s dream. And he had three sons, of course. Lorenzo, now 21, had given up his own dreams of becoming a racing driver a few years earlier to give his younger brother every chance of success. ‘I was at the national level in karting,’ says Lorenzo, rather than pan-European or global. ‘Being lucid, I saw that it would be impossible for me to get to F1.So, I stopped, because the family’s best bet was for Charles to succeed, because he, at eleven, was already standing out from the crowd, with drivers like Ocon and Gasly.’

To beat Albon and Verstappen and to step up to the more powerful KF2 class, Charles needed investment. ‘My parents aren’t particularly rich,’ he says. ‘My grandparents were a little bit, so they were helping us pay for the hotels and all that, but they never wanted to invest anything in racing.’

‘Every year, in karting, we said to ourselves that it was the last season,’ says Lorenzo. ‘Charles handled the pressure, knowing that if he didn’t get the results it was over, and that, even if he had the results, it still might not be enough. Hervé tried to keep it going by all means possible.’

And Philippe was doing all he could too, even though his son Jules was his main focus. Jules had won his debut season in single-seaters straight out of the box, taking five victories and the French Formula Renault 2.0 title in 2007, and the Masters of Formula 3 win at Zolder in 2008. In 2009, he won the F3 Euro Series title, previously won by Nico Hulkenberg, Romain Grosjean and Lewis Hamilton. For 2010, he was racing in the GP2 Series, the most direct feeder to Formula One. And from the age of seventeen, he’d been managed by Nicolas Todt, son of the most powerful man in motor sport, Jean Todt.

Philippe picked up the phone to his son’s young and ambitious manager. ‘I called Nicolas and explained to him what I was thinking. I felt I had to, because Charles’ potential was so huge. It was not just to help my best friend’s son, but to help not miss such a talent. Because it was obvious that other people would notice Charles’ talent. Nicolas, Charles and Hervé met, and an agreement was quickly made.’

2

THE MENTOR

On the occasion of Charles Leclerc’s first visit to the Ferrari headquarters, in the industrial town of Maranello near Modena, he wasn’t permitted to enter. He was eleven years old, brought along by his godfather Jules, who was racing in Formula 3 at the time and was the first driver to have been signed for the new Ferrari Driver Academy (FDA). Jules went inside the Ferrari complex to attend a photoshoot, and Charles was left to amuse himself. ‘So I sat in the car park for two hours,’ he remembered, ‘trying to guess what it was like inside. I imagined Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, y’know? With Oompa Loompas running around.’

Bianchi was on the road to Formula One and, if he could reach the targets set for him by the most famous brand in all of motor sport, he could soon follow in the footsteps of his hero Michael Schumacher by racing in red. In fact, Jules wasn’t the first Bianchi to wear the yellow shield. His great uncle Lucien, who was an Italian-born Belgian, entered a total of nineteen F1 grands prix, and came third in Monaco in 1968. He was successful in touring cars, sports cars and rally cars as well. He won the Tour de France Automobile four times, the 12 Hours of Sebring twice, as well as the Targa Florio, the Nürburgring 1,000 km and the Spa 24 Hours. Most notably, he contested the Le Mans 24 Hours thirteen times between 1956 and 1968, eight times in a Ferrari. He took class honours in the Ferrari 500 TRC in 1957 and the Ferrari 250 GTO in 1964, and then won the legendary race overall in 1968 in the iconic Gulf-liveried Ford GT40 with his co-driver Pedro Rodriguez. Lucien’s career came to a tragic end in a testing crash at Le Mans the following year, when his Alfa Romeo T33 spun into a telegraph pole.

Jules’ grandfather was also a racer. Mauro Bianchi won the 1966 Macau Grand Prix and entered the Le Mans 24 Hours six times, claiming a class win in 1967 driving an Alpine A210. He suffered severe burns in the 1968 edition and retired from racing after his brother was killed in 1969.

Jules had grown up in Nice with his two siblings, perfected his race craft at the Brignoles track under the watchful eye of father Philippe and entered competitive karting, finishing in the top three in fifteen different championships and trophies. To plot his path from French Formula Renault 2.0 (which he won) to Formula One, he entered into a management contract with 30-year-old talent scout and manager Nicolas Todt. Nicolas is the only child of Jean Todt, who was the CEO and team principal of Ferrari and went on to lead the FIA from 2009. His father’s considerable influence has been a factor in securing contracts with teams, lucrative sponsors and any other entity that might wish to curry favour with the president of motor sport’s governing body. The main driver on Nicolas’ books at the time was Brazil’s Felipe Massa, who raced eight seasons with Ferrari, won eleven grands prix and came within a hair’s breadth of winning the F1 title in 2008.

With fellow Frenchman Frédéric Vasseur, Nicolas co-owned the ART Grand Prix team, which would run Jules in the Formula 3 Euro Series and GP2 Series. He was third in the Euro Series in 2008, first in 2009 with nine wins, third both times in his two seasons in GP2 and second in the 2012 Formula Renault 3.5 Series with Tech 1 Racing. In 2011, he became an F1 test driver for Scuderia Ferrari and was elevated to a reserve driver role with the Force India team for 2012, driving in several official practice sessions.

By this time, Charles was also under the wing of Todt’s All Road Management. They’d done a deal – Nicolas, Hervé and thirteen-year-old Charles – after Philippe’s phone call, and Jules did his fair share of lobbying too to make sure the manager recognised Charles’ prodigious talent. ‘At the end of 2010, my father didn’t have any money,’ Leclerc told F1 journalist David Tremayne. ‘Jules went to Nicolas and told him, “Charles is in his last year [before he runs out of money], so look at him. If you’re interested, maybe you can do something with him.”’

‘Since 2011, Nicolas has helped me,’ Charles told pit lane reporter Lawrence Barretto. ‘We signed a contract, and then I had the security that my career will go on so long as I was getting the results. That is a big change. He was taking care of everything, finding sponsors, logistics, and I only had to focus on driving.’

Despite the eight-year age gap, and the fact Jules was his godfather, he and Charles were like brothers. ‘Jules was Lorenzo’s best friend, while I was closer to Tom, Jules’ little bro,’ Charles told The Independent. ‘Karting and motor sport made me feel really close to Jules. To be honest, we were all really close. Jules was the professional, he was my inspiration, my idol, a driver and a man who inspired me and gave me the will to keep fighting when things were not going the right way. Rivalry? Of course there was! We never missed an occasion to fight on the Brignoles track whenever he had time to come by, which was nearly any weekend he didn’t have a race.’

There were nineteen weekends in 2013 when Jules wouldn’t be anywhere near Brignoles, though, as he had stepped up to a Formula One race seat. He’d been meeting those crucial FDA targets, becoming more and more a part of Ferrari, and as a result he was loaned to the Marussia F1 Team.

Marussia were a back-of-the-grid outfit; a sleek and large-scale operation by the standards of the feeder series, but minnows in the rough waters of F1. Founded in 2010, they were initially called Virgin Racing. Billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson had had the opportunity to buy Brawn GP, which won the 2009 World Championship and went on to become the all-dominant Mercedes team. Branson declined and sponsored the establishment of a new team instead, owned and run by GP3 and F3 Euro Series stalwarts Manor Motorsport. Brawn would have been a better buy. Virgin Racing finished last in their debut year and did no better in their second. Virgin pulled the plug on its title sponsorship. Low-volume Russian supercar manufacturer Marussia had already bought a controlling stake in the Banbury-based team and put their name above the door. There was a vague uptick in performance – they were second from the bottom in 2012, with two twelfth places to show for it.

The following year’s Cosworth V8-powered MR02 wasn’t much of a step forward, but the team had an all-new driver line up: Britain’s Max Chilton, who’d been Marussia’s reserve driver the year before and who finished fourth in the 2012 GP2 Series; and Jules Bianchi.

It had been a last-minute arrangement between Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali, Nicolas Todt and Marussia’s team principal, the no-nonsense Yorkshireman John Booth. On 1 March 2013, Marussia announced that Jules was to replace Luiz Razia because the Brazilian hadn’t delivered the promised sponsorship. Sixteen days later, Jules qualified nineteenth for the Australian Grand Prix, three quarters of a second faster than Chilton. He overtook Pastor Maldonado and Daniel Ricciardo on the first lap and finished fifteenth on his debut. His best result of the season came the following race, in Malaysia: thirteenth. By the halfway point, in Hungary, Bianchi had beaten his teammate in every qualifying session and in all the races that both of them had finished.

That October, Marussia confirmed Bianchi would stay with them for 2014. They also announced they’d be receiving customer Ferrari engines. After struggling in the early rounds, Jules overcame the odds to score his – and his team’s – first championship points by finishing ninth at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Days before the Japanese Grand Prix that autumn, Jules declared himself ‘ready’ to step into the Scuderia Ferrari race seat should the team need him amid the looming departure of Fernando Alonso.

Leclerc had also been hitting the targets Nicolas Todt had set him. He won the 2011 CIK-FIA World Cup’s top category for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, beating Max Verstappen and Esteban Ocon, as well as winning the CIK-FIA Karting Academy Trophy and the ERDF Masters in Paris ahead of Anthoine Hubert, George Russell and Lance Stroll. In 2012, he moved up to the more powerful 125cc 35 bhp KF2 class with ART. He finished second in the CIK-FIA European Championship to Britain’s Ben Barnicoat (who would go on to race sports cars) and won the WSK Euro Series ahead of Verstappen.

‘In the karting days, we were enemies,’ Charles later said of his relationship with Verstappen. ‘We were fighting for championships and it was always quite tricky.’ Leclerc’s 2011 KF3 World Cup victory stuck in the Dutch youngster’s craw. Charles had overtaken him, clipping his front wheel on the way through. ‘It seemed as if he had done it on purpose,’ lamented Max afterwards. In truth, Max had been off the pace all weekend due to an uncharacteristically wonky set-up. Things came to a head the following year, in the WSK Euro Series, during a race at Val d’Argenton in western France. Interest in both drivers had intensified as they moved up the ranks, with the karting community sensing the genesis of a new golden generation of racing stars. When Leclerc and Verstappen collided during a wet qualifying session, both boys had a microphone shoved in their face. Charles was the calmer of the two. ‘He’s just unfair!’ seethed Verstappen. ‘I’m leading, he wants to pass, he pushes me, I push him back and after he pushes me off the track. It’s not fair, uh?’ His cheeks were flushed as his father, Jos, marched off ahead of him, incandescent that his lad had been taken out. The Italian interviewer went to challenge Leclerc, sensing a big story between the two up-and-comers. ‘It was just an incident,’ Charles shrugged, brushing it off. Years later, it still sticks in the memories of both men. ‘He ended up on the grass, but only because he got distracted while I was side-by-side with him,’ Leclerc said in 2020. ‘His kart went in such a deep puddle that only his helmet was sticking out of the water! He was furious, but now thinking about that episode makes me laugh a lot.’

Max never laughed it off, though, and the following year racing in the KZ class, which would be their final in karting before moving up to cars in 2014, Verstappen triumphed in the CIK-FIA World Championship. Charles came second.

Japan’s Suzuka track often finds itself in the path of biblical weather, and so it was on 5 October 2014 when Typhoon Phanfone passed through. The Japanese Grand Prix started behind the safety car and was paused after two laps before resuming again twenty minutes later. Red flags were out again on lap 46 and the race was never restarted; the reason being that Jules Bianchi had disappeared off the track under waved yellows three laps earlier.

Trying to keep tyre temperatures within an operating window in such conditions is difficult at the best of times. At Suzuka, it was really tricky. Jules entered the Dunlop curve too fast – at 132 mph – and slid off the track. The grass did little to decelerate his Marussia, and in his path was a tractor crane tending to Adrian Sutil’s stricken Sauber, which had spun off the previous lap. Bianchi was a passenger – the pedals and steering were completely useless. He was strapped to a cannonball speeding towards an unintended target. The car arrived at 78 mph, just 2.61 seconds after leaving the tarmac, and struck the 6.8-tonne vehicle nose-first at such an angle that it wedged itself under the crane’s chassis. Bianchi’s helmet was struck with an impact of 254G. ‘This was a scenario we could not have previously imagined,’ said the FIA Safety Commission’s head, Peter Wright, after an investigation. It was a seismic shock to the sport, having not suffered such a serious accident since the fateful weekend of 30 April 1994, when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed in separate accidents at Imola. The sport introduced new cockpit protection and ‘virtual safety car’ periods to replace similar yellow flag incidents as triggered by Sutil’s off at Suzuka, when a recovery vehicle or marshals could be on the circuit.

Jules sustained a severe diffuse axonal head injury from which he would never recover. After six weeks in the intensive care unit of Mie Prefectural General in Yokkaichi, he was repatriated to Nice’s Le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire’s neurological unit, where the 25-year-old died the following year, on 17 July 2015. ‘Jules fought right to the end, as he always did, but today his battle came to an end,’ read a statement released by his family.

The funeral at Nice’s Sainte Reparate Cathedral took place four days later, attended by FIA president Jean Todt, world champions Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel and France’s most successful F1 driver, Alain Prost, as well as all of Jules’ loved ones. Drivers Pastor Maldonado and Felipe Massa were in floods of tears during the service. Charles and his brother Lorenzo held it together, their minds lost in thought.

At the following Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the whole grid mourned Bianchi. Several of the drivers had been pallbearers and spoke of a kind, popular and talented member of their fraternity. Before the race, all the drivers placed their helmets in the middle of a circle and linked arms in a moment of silence. The race’s eventual winner, Vettel, dedicated his victory to the man who had been on course to join him at Ferrari.

Following his son’s death, Philippe could no longer watch F1 races. Speaking nine months later, he told the BBC: ‘Perhaps in a few months, a few years, I can see a grand prix again, I don’t know, but for the moment it’s too difficult. I can’t see pictures of the crash. It’s too difficult for me to look at the video.’

Jules’ accident and subsequent death had a deep and everlasting effect on the Leclerc family, so close were they to their friends the Bianchis, who were obviously heartbroken. Charles continued to race and pursue his dream to follow Jules up the Ferrari Driver Academy’s rungs and into Formula One, but it was with the knowledge that dreams can sometimes turn into nightmares, especially for loved ones that are left behind. His grandmother took to sewing a cross on the inside of his racing overalls. His mother, Pascale, would be nervous whenever her son drove out of the pit lane for ever more. She’s always the first person to text or call Charles after every race, to check he’s alright. When there’s an accident, she gets scared. ‘It’s tough on my mother,’ Charles told GQ, ‘and I don’t know what to tell her. Other than: I love what I do. There’s nothing in particular I can say to make her feel better. I’m not going to say I’ll be careful. That wouldn’t be true. I’m going to give it my best, whatever. She knows: It’s a dangerous sport. It’s got massively safer through the years, but it will remain for ever a dangerous sport. She knows,’ he offered with an incongruous smile, ‘I’m the happiest once I’m in that car.’

3

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

Charles was racing at Jerez in Spain in the final round of his debut season in single-seaters, in the Formula Renault 2.0 Alps Series, when he heard what had happened to Jules Bianchi 7,000 miles away in Japan. ‘My father wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I found out anyway. Obviously, it was quite hard,’ he later reflected. News reached him before the start of his two races that Sunday, but he went ahead and got in the car. ‘I had to. I had to do the best job I could in the car. In that moment, I didn’t really know all about Jules’ state, but I knew the accident was bad. I told myself that Jules would be happy for me to do well. He wouldn’t want me to think about it and have a bad race. So that’s the only thing I was thinking about; trying to do the best I could for him.’

Philippe Bianchi rang Hervé Leclerc several times a day from Yokkaichi to give him updates, Charles’ dad feeling powerless to assuage his friend’s living hell. Later, with Hervé’s middle son moving steadily up the ranks, Philippe would think wistfully about what might have been. ‘My childhood friend Hervé and I were dreaming of both sitting in the grandstands to see both of our champions hitting the track and fighting each other. It should have been like that, but fate sadly didn’t agree …’