Beating Lewis Hamilton can be career defining for Charles Leclerc

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Competing with Lewis Hamilton can raise Charles Leclerc to new heights after a strong 2024 - Getty Images/Kym Illman

The Formula One circus has decamped to Melbourne for the opening round of the 2025 season and I must say that it feels right to be back here for the first race. As a kid growing up, sleeping on the sofa, ready to roll over and turn the television on at 4am felt like a right of passage that you took to prove to yourself that you were a true F1 fan and I hope that the wave of Netflix converts appreciate it too.

With eighty per cent of the teams fielding a new driver pairing for the season, there are so many great story lines. Can Lando Norris deliver a first driver’s title? Will McLaren carry on from where they ended the year in Abu Dhabi with the fastest car? Have Red Bull turned a corner and found out why their form went away last year? How soon can the great Adrian Newey start to have an influence at Aston Martin?

Over and above all of this however, everywhere I’ve gone in the past few weeks, the first question people ask is “do you think Lewis can win at Ferrari?”. The impact of the sport’s most decorated driver joining the sport’s most successful team has been unprecedented and the buzz across the global fanbase is great for the sport on the whole. Past history and hype is no guarantee of future success of course and both Lewis and team boss Fred Vasseur are acutely aware of that so they’re carefully managing expectations.

Getting the better of Charles Leclerc is going to be Lewis’ first challenge. The Monegasque driver had a very good year in 2024, ironing out the errors that plagued his title challenge in 2022. He seems genuinely excited to go up against Lewis because he knows that beating the Brit could be career defining. This will spur him on to focus even harder than last year. For the past three seasons, I have often said that over one lap in qualifying, I believe that Charles is currently the fastest driver in Formula 1. Lewis is statistically the most successful qualifier in F1 history but his recent run against George Russell (an excellent qualifier himself) at Mercedes hasn’t been great. Rediscovering that qualifying form will be the first challenge.

The pre-season test days in Bahrain have offered some clues into what to expect and I have to say that it was nice to see Lewis looking energised, re-motivated and also crucially more comfortable with the Ferrari in a day and a half than he looked in the Mercedes for all of last season.

As a sports fan, I would love to see Hamilton win his eighth world championship at Ferrari – it would be a story right up there with Simone Biles’ glorious return in Paris last year or Mark Cavendish finally breaking the record for the most number of Tour de France stage wins. Great sportspeople achieve unprecedented success when their critics write them off as being over the hill.

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From the little clues we got in testing, I believe that Lando Norris will start the season as the favourite for the first time in his F1 career. He got the first win monkey off his back last year and in the past 10 months, the McLaren team have really done a fantastic job of developing a car that seemed to have a wide envelope of performance that makes them competitive at the whole range of tracks from Monaco to Monza and everything in between. They didn’t start 2024 well in Bahrain and it’s always been a bit of a bogey track for them. Therefore, the fact that the car looked like being the standout package in testing at Bahrain bodes well for the team.

Oscar Piastri had some terrific highs last season, the victory in Baku being absolutely out of the top drawer. He didn’t have the same level of consistency of his British teammate and certainly there were a few weekends where the gap in qualifying hurt him in the race. However, the Aussie made a big step between his debut season in 2023 and last season and if he makes another step up this year, he could well be a title contender. A victory at Albert Park this weekend, ten minutes away from where he grew up would be a very popular result with the locals.

The doyen of the motor car industry Henry Ford once said “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”. While it may be harsh to classify third place in the world championship as a failure, Red Bull Racing will be determined to hit back in 2025. While last season started chaotically off the track, on track the results were strong. As the year unfolded that trend swapped over and there were times when the Red Bulls seemed like the fourth fastest car. The brilliance of Max Verstappen dragged them over the line to win the drivers’ crown but the opposition will be better and more experienced this year.

I rate Liam Lawson very highly and think he’s a great character as well. The Kiwi has picked up the poisoned chalice of being Verstappen’s teammate and for his sake, I really hope that the RB21 proves to be a car that has a wider working range than its predecessor. I do believe that Lawson has the talent to come good, provided he’s given time and a car that allows him to build his confidence. As a season rookie, albeit with eleven races under his belt, building that confidence against a driver like Verstappen with no real weaknesses will be a massive mental challenge.

Karun Chandhok is a former F1 driver and currently a pundit on Sky Sports F1

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