Autosport Top 50 of 2024: #2 Charles Leclerc

If 2024 was a year when Ferrari made it clear exactly how much Charles Leclerc means to the team – signing him to a new contract and leaving Carlos Sainz exposed when Lewis Hamilton became available – then he too showed how much the Prancing Horse means to him.

The disappointment at Ferrari of losing the constructors’ battle to McLaren in Abu Dhabi on a day when Leclerc had risen from 19th on the grid to third – surely one of his most impressive F1 drives – was etched on his face in the paddock post-race.

Like Lando Norris, Leclerc could have been champion this term but for his team not providing him with the best car package. After all, from the summer break onwards he scored the most points of the whole pack (179 – four more than Norris and 19 over Max Verstappen).

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Leclerc’s main problem was that Ferrari went off the boil in car performance terms with its floor update introduced at June’s Spanish GP, which robbed him of confidence in the fastest corners. But at Spa, in the wet or dry, Leclerc was seriously impressive. He scored brilliant wins at Monza and Austin once the season was going again and Ferrari’s recovery was on.

Leclerc ended his Monaco hoodoo and also delivered statement victories at Monza and COTA during a superb year

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

At the start of the year, Leclerc had surprisingly been the weaker in Ferrari’s line-up. His struggles with tyre preparation in qualifying coincided with the bombshell to Sainz of his dropping for 2025, fuelling the Spaniard to new heights of performance. But Leclerc rallied and Sainz’s run proved unsustainable.

Leclerc’s 33-lap stint at the Italian GP where every lap was within a second earned headlines in his fantastic win there, but it should not be forgotten that he was also great on another one-stopper back in China. This tyre management element of his game is often overlooked, around all that qualifying wildness.

There was less of this on display overall in 2024, although his Bahrain, Australia, Singapore, Mexico and Abu Dhabi qualifying errors were costly. Austria was a messy one overall and at Imola and in Mexico he had race offs too. That Las Vegas radio outburst was weird. But perhaps his biggest mistake was assuming he’d get the lead back in Baku when Oscar Piastri attacked.

In a year where he deserved the plaudits for his brilliant racecraft, his qualifying record against Sainz (17-12 head-to-head record from all sessions, with an average advantage of 0.115s, the closest between any team-mates this year) and the competition he had within his own team boosts his ranking.

And there was beautiful emotion too – on display most when he finally won at home in Monaco.

How good Leclerc was in 2024, in the Ferrari star’s own words

One of the key reasons why Leclerc got the nod over Norris for second place in this ranking was his strength in wheel-to-wheel combat this season: the only driver to offer Verstappen a battle during the Dutchman’s rise at Interlagos; his brilliant, swooping pass on George Russell at Turn 1 in China; his holding off of Piastri’s faster McLaren at Zandvoort and in Qatar.

Storming around the outside of Russell at China’s Turn 1 underlined Leclerc’s racecraft strength

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Ahead of the Abu Dhabi season finale, Autosport asked Leclerc what all that meant to him, as well as to assess his 2024 season. Here’s his reply in full.

CL: I always enjoy wheel-to-wheel. It’s always a very exciting moment of the weekend where you’ve got to adapt to different drivers. Of course, you get to know drivers and you adapt your driving style to it as well and obviously when lots is at stake, it’s where you can take more risk and that’s where I enjoy it the most.

For example, with our car [in Qatar, with pressure on in the constructors’ championship] obviously there was a bit more risk taken just because I knew that it was very important for us to be taking as many points as possible to McLaren. So, there’s also this part of the story. When you are fighting with one clear target, you can afford to be a bit more on the aggressive side, which I enjoy.

Then looking back at the season, I think it’s been very solid from the whole team. I think there’s the performance of the car, which we weren’t at the level where we wanted to be for the first half of the season. The second half, we were more in line with McLaren and Red Bull.

But as a driver, I feel like looking back at this year, there hasn’t been really any missed opportunities, which in the other years, when I look back, there was always one or two races where I wanted to do things that were not possible. And, by that, it was biting me. That would mean that I would get zero points in a weekend where I could have got eight or 10.

Even if that’s not much, at the end when you add these things up it makes a difference and on a year like this, I don’t think I’ve left any chances behind. That is why I’m satisfied with the season.