Lewis Hamilton v Charles Leclerc: A bigger challenge than George Russell?

Lewis Hamilton will have a new team-mate in Charles Leclerc for the F1 2025 season and the new Ferrari pairing promises to be one of the strongest on the grid.

At the same time, it will provide a big challenge for the seven-time World Champion…

F1 data: An early look into the Lewis Hamilton v Charles Leclerc battle

Hamilton is coming off his worst season in his 18 years in F1.

The British driver was beaten by George Russell in his last season at Mercedes in both qualifying and race.

Russell is an expert qualifying driver. In his three years alongside Hamilton, he only lost the qualifying head to head in their first year as team-mates.

In 2023 they tied and in 2024, Hamilton was soundly beaten.

That said, in terms of race pace Hamilton has always had an extra point of performance and the overall forces have evened out.

As has been the case in every year he has shared the garage with Russell, and despite worse qualifying data, Hamilton has always improved his figures during Sundays even if that didn’t see him finish ahead of Russell in the Championship both in 2022 and 2024.

The final race of the 2024 season in Abu Dhabi was a great reflection of what Hamilton is capable of with his ‘Hammer time’ mode activated.

The final overtake on Russell on the last lap of the race to cap an epic comeback was a warning to the world: ‘Still I rise.’

Overall, Hamilton has lost the qualifying head to head against Russell with a 29-39 record.

In the races, however, it’s a dead heat: 34-34. And in terms of total points scored for Mercedes, Hamilton beats Russell by 697 to 695 points.

These figures do justice to the rivalry between these two great drivers.

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An undeniably fast Russell on Saturdays – who is still unbeaten against any team-mate on an overall head-to head comparison in qualifying – and an experienced Hamilton able to come back despite the many problems he has suffered in 2024, which have left a big question mark for F1 2025.

And that question is: will he be able to beat Charles Leclerc? How difficult is it going to be for him?

Curiously, like Russell, the current Ferrari driver is an expert in qualifying… but on Sundays he tends to lose that extra bit of magic that he manages to bring out in one-lap pace performance.

Perhaps the most representative data that reflects this is the very low ratio of poles to wins converted by Leclerc.

Of his 26 pole positions, he has only managed to achieve five wins starting from the first spot of the grid.

This gives a percentage of 19.23%, one of the worst conversions in F1 history.

Hamilton, on the other hand, has a 58.65% conversion rate.

Along with Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Alberto Ascari and Jenson Button he is one of the best converters of pole positions into wins… but a far cry from the impressive 80% of Max Verstappen, who is inevitably the king in this statistic.

Taking Sebastian Vettel out of the equation, the data against Carlos Sainz shows Leclerc as the big winner in the rivalry against the Spaniard despite finishing behind in the Championship in their first year as team-mates.

Leclerc has won the overall head to head in qualifying by 54-32 and in the race by 52-34 against Sainz.

The Monegasque driver has scored 1029 points for Ferrari to Sainz’s 900.5 in their four years as team-mates.

Against Vettel, Leclerc won head to head in qualifying overall by 25-13. And in the race a slight victory by 19-17 despite Vettel’s decline in 2020 before becoming an Aston Martin driver.

It is therefore safe to say that Leclerc will arguably be a bigger challenge to Hamilton than Russell in at least his first year as a Ferrari driver.

The Monegasque driver has already shown that he is not afraid to take on established champions and has so far beaten all of his team-mates.

And despite still being young he is now the fourth driver with most races completed for Ferrari and the second one with the most points achieved with a total of 1387, just 23 behind from the 1,400 achieved by Vettel.

For Hamilton, defeating the ghosts of his poor qualifying performance in 2024 will be even more difficult with Leclerc in F1 2025, perhaps one of the best qualifiers on the grid, as the data reflects, and still to be beaten by a team-mate.

But in the race, Hamilton will find another great driver who, like Russell, struggles a little more to get the most out of the car.

It is something the seven-time World Champion must use to his advantage to dethrone Leclerc and claim Ferrari’s leading role before the new era of technical regulations in F1 2026.

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