The eagle-eyed amongst the F1 ‘twitter-sphere’ on Tuesday spotted something far too endearing to ignore ahead of F1 75 Live in London. Sat next to each other in sleek black suits, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were already turned off by the preamble in The O2. As such, Leclerc whipped out his mobile phone and triggered a game of online chess between the pair. Currently, Hamilton has a one-game lead.
Nip-and-tuck already, it seems, in the quest for checkmate. This year, seven-time world champion Hamilton and Ferrari’s long-term golden boy Leclerc will be teammates at the prancing horse yet, in the same breath, will carve out every millisecond to beat the other.
Is your teammate your friend or foe? In F1 spiel, it’s more often the latter. And as Hamilton will know from his torrid qualifying record against George Russell last year (5-19), the stopwatch doesn’t lie.
Yet as the fabled Italian outfit unleashed Hamilton to the waiting world this week – first in London on Tuesday, followed by a test run in their 2025 car in Fiorano on Wednesday – both drivers are keeping face for now: courteous smiles, warm handshakes and the correct turn of phrase, in the face of a 24-race storm to come.
One thing is for sure: if Ferrari’s SF-25 car (steered by both drivers for the first time on Wednesday) is capable of winning races, it will be hammer and tong between these two great competitors over the next nine months.
“The passion here [at Ferrari] is like nothing I have ever seen,” Hamilton said, on Wednesday. “They have got absolutely every ingredient needed to win a world championship.
“The competition is fierce and it is going to be close at the top but with the energy that I am receiving from the team, there’s magic here.
“For me, I am not thinking about the number eight. I’m thinking like it is the first for Ferrari and the first championship that the team will have won for some time.”
Hamilton and Leclerc share more in common than you might initially think, for a duo 13 years, 97 victories and seven championships apart.
Both have strong interests in the world of music and fashion, for instance. Both are respectful, cordial characters away from the racetrack. And both are among the most popular stars in the sport, with Jack Whitehall’s flamboyant introductions to rapturous applause on Tuesday night a sign of that.
But their strengths behind the wheel of a racing car? Nowadays, they’re polar opposites.
Leclerc has long been known to thrive in qualifying on a Saturday. Whilst the Monegasque only has eight race wins to his name, he has 26 pole positions. Entering his eighth season in the sport, Leclerc has a superior qualifying record to his teammate in all seven previous campaigns.
His ability to wrestle and ride the bumps and bruises of pushing an F1 car to the limit over one lap led Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok to tell The Independent last year that Leclerc is the “best qualifier in F1.” Better even than Max Verstappen.
Yet Leclerc is prone to errors on race day. Signs of his own previous title tilt, in 2022, quickly faded after bad errors in Imola and Paul-Ricard. The balance of pure pace and tyre management, alongside old-fashioned race-craft, is not his biggest asset.
Leclerc’s issue this year is that it is Hamilton’s most sizeable strength. Even after a difficult three years of nothingness at Mercedes, Hamilton’s victory at Silverstone last year was the F1 great at his mighty best.
Yet Hamilton’s 2024 – his worst-ever season in 18 seasons in F1, by championship position having finished seventh – was overshadowed by a wretched run on Saturdays. So much so that a man who carried self-confidence in abundance began to question his own skills.
“I’m just slow,” he said in December.
All of this will give a large plate of food for thought to team principal Fred Vasseur, tasked with managing the pair this year. Vasseur has a history with both – Leclerc in his rookie year at Alfa Romeo and Hamilton as a junior when winning GP2 – but is set to let them race from the first grand prix in under a month’s time.
But how long can it realistically last? Sure, a similar scenario could present itself at McLaren with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. Yet with Max Verstappen and George Russell (and remember, they definitely don’t get on) the undisputed No 1 drivers at Red Bull and Mercedes this year, is there a risk of Hamilton and Leclerc taking points off each other?
Can Ferrari afford that, as they eye a first drivers’ title since Kimi Raikkonen in 2007?
That was Hamilton’s rookie year, in which he took the fight straight to two-time world champion Fernando Alonso at race one with a memorable turn one manoeuvre for McLaren. Nico Rosberg will also tell you that no intra-team friend of Hamilton stays amicable for long if they are striving to outpace the Briton in a title fight.
A title fight that Hamilton, he insists, is in the shape of his life for: “My resolution for the year was that my life, my mentality, had to be elevated in absolutely every area – my fitness, my time management, how I engage with my engineers, how much time I spend in the factory, all these different things.
“I’ve definitely done that and I will continue to do that, in this strive for perfection and to achieve the success that I’m aiming to achieve.
“And if I was fortunate enough to win another title, which is obviously what we’re setting out to do, I don’t see myself stopping.”
As for Leclerc, he is desperate to win his first world championship; a goal he has, for some years now, labelled his one main “dream” in F1.
All of it makes for the most fascinating of season openings in Australia on 16 March. Yet from London to Italy, Hamilton now heads to next week’s pre-season test in Bahrain. That will be the ultimate litmus test: can Ferrari give their drivers the tools to go for glory in this most open of championship fights?
