Charles Leclerc revealed new details about the “eureka” moment that changed his feeling when driving the Ferrari during the Formula 1 British GP, which marked his first victory of the 2026 season, as well as breaking a nearly two-year drought since the Monegasque’s last win.
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After the race, the Ferrari driver explained that he found an important change during the data analysis on Friday night in Silverstone. According to him, a specific detail helped improve his adaptation to the car: “It’s very hard to say because there isn’t a moment when you realize everything you did wrong, so there’s a lot of work trying to understand in the data what is making me less comfortable with these cars,” Leclerc told the press.
The driver stated that he identified something hard to measure, but that could improve his confidence if adjusted. “But there was a moment on Friday night in Silverstone when I saw a detail, and I thought: ‘Ok, this is very hard to quantify, but if I can change this and make it more to my liking, then my feeling will probably be much better.’”
Leclerc explained that the change was applied on Saturday and brought a significant improvement, although he could not reveal exactly what the adjustment was: “I did that on Saturday afternoon, and the car got much better, but unfortunately I can’t give more details, so I don’t know if it makes much sense to try to explain without giving the details, but it’s based on very subtle details.”
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The Monegasque also highlighted that, in the current Formula 1 cars, small differences can cause big impacts on performance. “With these cars, sometimes you have to be careful because the drop is quite big, and you can start losing a lot of power unit performance if you’re not efficient, if you don’t accelerate cleanly, if you simply don’t do things consistently, always the same way.”
For Leclerc, besides the discovery made in Silverstone, some changes in driving style were also important to better adapt to the current generation of cars. “So I think there was a bit of that, and then there were just a few things I changed in Silverstone to try to suit this generation of cars, and to try to help my driving with that, and that improved things quite a lot.”
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