Charles Leclerc: Merging "aggressive" style with F1…

Charles Leclerc: Merging "aggressive" style with F1 2026 cars is this year's biggest challenge

Charles Leclerc believes that the main challenge of 2026 has emerged in attempting to marry his "aggressive" driving style with the demands of the current Formula 1 machinery.

The Monegasque said he made a few changes in his approach to the British Grand Prix weekend in order to get the most out of his Ferrari SF-26, which ultimately led to his first grand prix victory of the season - and his first since 2024.

With both powertrain and chassis regulations having undergone vast changes for this season, the cars have presented the drivers with a very different experience. While the challenge of managing energy has perhaps been the most obvious, with energy deployment having become a significant part of driving this year's cars, the lower levels of downforce have also necessitated a new approach.

Although Leclerc has now matched team-mate Lewis Hamilton on one win apiece this season, he is fractionally behind his more experienced team-mate after the opening third of the 2026 season - and was keen to point out that it was the overall formula behind that, rather than the Ferrari naturally suiting Hamilton more.

"I don't think it's with the Ferrari itself," Leclerc said. I think it's more with this generation of cars. I've got quite an aggressive driving style in general.

"I think that has been a strength during my career. But then with these cars, sometimes you've got to be careful not going the other side because then the dip is quite big.

"You can start losing quite a lot of performance power unit-wise if you are not efficient, if you don't go on the throttle in a clean way, if you just don't do things constantly.

"Then it starts becoming a bit tricky because you get into very different issues where your speed into the next corner is different and that changes your braking point and you are always re-adapting your references and it makes it very, very difficult. So, I think there was a little bit of that.

"And then there was just a few things that I just changed in Silverstone to try and fit this generation of cars and to try and help my driving with it. That made it quite a bit, I mean, quite a lot better.

"But as I said in Silverstone, this is something I want to prove on multiple racetracks. I'm very happy with the race win, but it's not only with one race win that now everything is fine and I'm relaxed. So there's a lot of work in order to try and keep that form and keep that feeling most of all.

"If the feeling is there, as I was saying earlier, then it's always been the case that when I feel good with a car, normally the lap times and the performance comes."

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari (Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images)

Leclerc continued, explaining that there was not necessarily a single breakthrough moment in terms of noticing his struggles - but did spot a smoking gun in a lengthy spell trawling through his data after Silverstone's sprint qualifying session.

Although keen to keep a lid on specifics, the Ferrari driver says that an attempt to change this once parc ferme reopened after the sprint race did offer much more comfort.

"It's very difficult to say [where the turning point was], because it's not as easy as that one moment where you realise everything you've done wrong.

"So it's a lot of work and trying to understand in the data what is making myself less comfortable with these cars. But there's a moment on Friday night in Silverstone where I saw a detail.

"I was like, 'OK, this is very difficult to quantify, but if I happen to change that and to make it more to my liking, then my feeling will most likely be a lot better'. And when I did that on the Saturday in the afternoon when we could change the car, things were a lot better. So, yeah, that's a good thing.

"Unfortunately, I cannot give much more details. So I don't know if it makes much sense, trying to explain it without giving the details of it, because there's very little sense in what I say that way.

"But just to say that it relies on very fine details and it's not as black and white as it might seem. But it was cool to see that it paid off."