At the chaotic 2026 Italian Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc’s early crash and red flag seemed destined to make him Ferrari’s latest scapegoat. Yet the Monégasque remains almost impossible to hate: a Ferrari Academy prodigy, tifosi idol and relentless qualifier whose loyalty and brilliance shine through even as strategic blunders and misfortune test his fans’ faith and patience.
It was the best and the worst of times at the 2026 Italian Grand Prix on Sunday. The Italian won at Monza from P19. The Italian team had a terrible defeat at Monza despite starting P3 and P4. An unlikely Frenchman got a podium. A Monégasque crashed out into a red flag on Lap 2.
And in all the Charles Dickens-esque superlatives that can be applied to Monza’s race on Sunday, Charles Leclerc’s crash has been one of the biggest superlatives, eclipsed only by the fact that a twenty-year-old Kimi Antonelli in a rocketship won his home race all the way from P19.
You would imagine that after all this, Leclerc would be the next scapegoat on the hate train. Except that it’s really difficult to hate Charles Leclerc.
It’s not new knowledge that Charles Leclerc is, quite simply, Ferrari royalty. Not just because he drives the red car, or because Ferrari has wrapped him in the mythology of the Scuderia. And not just because the tifosi have given him names like Il Predestinato, Re di Monza and Ferrari’s prince. Although all of these, combined, make for a very good mythology: the protege of Jules Bianchi, the youngest Ferrari polesitter, the one who broke the Monaco curse… the list goes on.
But to understand the allure of Charles Leclerc is to understand the driver who went head-to-head against Sebastian Vettel in 2019.
Ferrari might have held the adage of being the team where the most decorated drivers go at the end of their career, but that does not take away from the fact that in 2019, when twenty-one-year-old Charles Leclerc was promoted to Ferrari after a season at Sauber, he was racing beside a driver with four world championships behind him and the expectation that he would finally bring the Scuderia back to the top. Leclerc was supposed to learn. Instead, he immediately became a problem for his much more decorated teammate.
Leclerc out-qualified Vettel four times in a row that autumn (the first Ferrari driver to do that since Michael Schumacher), took two wins in his rookie Ferrari season (Spa, twenty-four hours after the death of his close friend Anthoine Hubert, and Monza the following week, back-to-back) and ten podiums.
Winning the Italian Grand Prix for Ferrari is already enough to turn a driver into a Tifosi favourite. Doing it in your first season with the team, while fighting off both Mercedes cars (again, two very capable hyperengineered spaceships) for much of the race, shoots you straight to the stratosphere.
And if, after so many heartbreaks, it ends with you winning the Monaco Grand Prix and breaking a ninety-three year old home race curse, who in their right minds would not feel for you?
And it’s not just the stats that make him so beloved. His duels with Verstappen have supplied some of the sport's better recent theatre, from the overtake in Austria in 2019 or the Jeddah shootout in 2022 that Leclerc lost by half a second to the 2024 Interlagos scrap.
It's a willingness to hang the car on the edge of what it can do and correct last minute, a habit that occasionally puts him in a wall (Monaco 2021, on his own front row, most memorably) that produces laps nobody else in the field could have found. Between them, Hamilton, Verstappen and Leclerc currently hold the top three spots on the all-time pole list among active drivers, in that order. Leclerc's 27 are more than any Ferrari driver in history except Schumacher, and more than Alonso has managed in twenty-three seasons on the grid.
Leclerc's relationship with Ferrari has been built on moments like these. The nicknames did not come from nowhere. He is the Ferrari Academy graduate who actually made it to the Scuderia, the young driver who displaced the team's established hierarchy, and the one who has remained remarkably loyal to Ferrari through some truly preposterous levels of organisational chaos.
Sadly, for Leclerc, motor racing is not a solo sport, and Ferrari’s strategic and engineering blunders reflect just as much on him as it does on the team. If you watched the sport from 2019 up to 2022, you’d know the talent that this man has. But it’s been four years since then, and four years is long enough time for the sport’s recently enlarging, internet-addled fanbase to overlook the highs that he has achieved. After all, many still tend to forget the team effort that goes into just finishing one race, let alone standing on the podium every weekend.
And so when my phone rang with anguished messages from the group chat, all some variation of how difficult it has been lately to justify supporting Charles Leclerc, all I could think of was how being a fan of a sporting team is really an exercise in hope, and holding on even when all seems lost.