Who slept best after the F1 British GP: Charles Leclerc

July 6, 2026 · Yahoo Sports

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It must not be easy to be a top athlete these days. Perhaps not so much when you're winning - because praise comes from all angles, and it's great to feel loved and appreciated. But winning isn't easy when you're competing against other top athletes - and more often than not you'll get everything but praise and appreciation.

It probably hasn't been easy to be Charles Leclerc lately, with the world celebrating Lewis Hamilton's revival while portraying you in a far less flattering light.

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It must be said Leclerc contributed to that narrative - not only, and probably not even primarily, by being a touch slower than his team-mate over a few races, but by simultaneously putting his car in places it simply shouldn't have been: facing the wrong way in Miami or ending up in the barriers in Barcelona. There was that Monaco crash as well, which Charles chose not to take the blame for, instead pointing the finger at the brakes.

But it all, one way or another, added to the overall impression.

It was inevitable content would be created around it. People consume content and - let's not pretend otherwise - they tend to enjoy it even more when it's negative. But while the whole world may find some strange pleasure in consuming negative content about you, you probably don't. Surely the algorithms aren't particularly kind to struggling top athletes, and keep feeding them stories about themselves.

So, if you're Charles Leclerc, whenever you tap the wrong thing on your phone, you might see anonymous users calling you a number two driver, guys like Juan Pablo Montoya telling you to learn from Lewis, or Guenther Steiner saying something similar with a couple of f-words thrown in.

And that's if you're lucky. Because sometimes Jacques Villeneuve wants to talk about you too.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

That is, by the way, not necessarily wrong. It's simply part of being a top athlete. If you don't want all these people talking about you, you probably shouldn't race in Formula 1.

The same applies to any elite sport. Elite sport exists to be watched - and talked about. The spotlight isn't a side effect; it's part of the competition. If you want to win Wimbledon, you have to accept the cameras, the headlines and the people shouting things about your serve. If all you want is to play tennis, there are plenty of empty courts where nobody sees or cares whether you hit the ball in or out.

But if you've chosen to be a top athlete, how you deal with the noise is your problem. And in Leclerc's case, it's his.

A long time ago, when Leclerc could still very much be described as a young and promising star, Mattia Binotto - who was still in charge at Ferrari - compared him to Jacques Villeneuve's father. While flattering, there was one aspect of Gilles' legendary image you probably wouldn't want to inherit: an incredibly quick driver who either didn't want to, or perhaps simply didn't know how to, stop pushing right at the limit.

You could argue Leclerc has a bit of that, though. Everyone makes mistakes, but there's a feeling he makes just a few too many - and sometimes in situations where they aren't entirely forced. Like Miami.

That's debatable too, of course - and could equally be dismissed as the opinion of another no-name. But content won't create itself. Well... some of it does these days, actually. So it's probably not the worst piece of content about the Monegasque driver of late.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Anyway, it must have felt good to be Leclerc on Sunday at Silverstone. Because you reminded not only yourself, but also all the Montoyas and Villeneuves of this world that you hadn't suddenly become a number two driver.

"It means a lot," he said after arriving in the press conference room and settling onto the curved red sofa. "It means a lot when things get tough, and that's literally the situation I've been in the last few races.

"Obviously there's a lot of negativity around me in general, with narratives being created, and it's never a nice environment to work in."

A few minutes later he was asked to elaborate - with one of those questions that already contains a suggested answer: "You talked about the narratives that you felt have been there in the past couple of weeks. Could you talk a little bit about that and how do you handle that? Does it become fuel for you to kind of prove things wrong?"

And it's good that Leclerc is the way he is, because he didn't take the invitation. Instead, he simply admitted that the "narrative" hadn't been pleasant.

"I don't know if it fuels me," he said. "Honestly, I think anybody that says that would lie. I think whenever there's so much negativity around, it's not something so nice to see. So no, I mean, you try to cancel the noise as much as possible. I try to not look at my phone and focus on what is relevant and in order to also have the right picture of the situation, because things are said and you go from hero to zero, from zero to hero, in like two days in this sport, and so it can influence then the way you see a situation.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

"So no, my job was really to just try and cancel that noise, to not look at anything, to not listen to anything. And I know that I didn't become a bad driver from one day to the other. It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car."

And that's the real reason Silverstone was so good for Leclerc. But if you take him at his word, the victory wasn't the result of some mental breakthrough. On that front, all he had to do was manage the outside noise.

The real breakthrough came through the work.

"These cars are very specific, are very different to the way we've been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it," he said. "I was very strong for the first part of the season, then I lost a bit of feeling with the car. We changed quite a few things with the car and it took a bit more time than what I had wished to get back to the level I wanted. And on top of that, we've had some issues on the Sunday that cost me quite a lot of points."

He then added: "It's more about small details that just fit my driving a little bit better in a particular phase of the corner. I don't want to go too much into detail there. But it's just a few things that I saw on the data on Friday night and I was like, 'OK, that might be things that just don't fit with my driving style.'

"And we changed those few things from sprint race to qualifying and that was a lot better. So yeah, I was very proud of the work we've done to see that because I think this kind of change is not really so black and white. You just don't look at data and say, 'My God, OK, this is what we need to change.' It's intuition mixed with feeling. Then we went for it and it was actually a very successful direction for me."

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, George Russell, Mercedes

The narrative will change now. Not completely, because it's still Hamilton chasing two Silver Arrows in the title fight. But things move quickly in Formula 1.

Leclerc is probably too far behind to dream of winning the championship this year, but was that ever realistically on offer for Ferrari anyway? If there was ever a time to go through a difficult spell and learn from it, this may have been it. Because realistically, it's still going to be Mercedes winning this year, isn't it?

What he should take from Silverstone is the belief that if he does his part of the job - and manages to shut out the noise - it works.

If Ferrari can maintain this trajectory, next year may offer a better opportunity. And when it comes, he'd better not give anyone any reason to doubt him - because he's not that young anymore either. Chances like that don't arrive exactly when you're ready for them. You have to be ready all the time.

Because that's part of the job of being a top athlete, too.

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