Leclerc’s defiant stance as Lewis Hamilton week continues in Maranello

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will be team-mates at Ferrari in 2025
As his new team-mate Lewis Hamilton makes headlines around the world, Charles Leclerc has defiantly stated that he’s “ready” to win the F1 2025 championship for Ferrari.
Although Leclerc has been the Tifosi’s favourite son throughout the last four seasons in his partnership with Carlos Sainz, this week it’s Hamilton’s name that’s ringing out on the streets of Maranello.
Charles Leclerc declares he’s ‘ready’ to win a title
The seven-time World Champion’s first official day as a Ferrari driver was on Monday when he met with Ferrari’s hierarchy as well as team principal Fred Vasseur and his new race engineer Riccardo Adami.
Taking photographs outside Enzo Ferrari’s house with its iconic red door and a Ferrari F40, his first walk-through the team’s Maranello headquarters and factory was also immortalised on camera. And don’t forget the throngs of Tifosi surrounding him as he signed autographs and took selfies.
The only person missing, at least on camera, was Hamilton’s new team-mate as there was no sign that Leclerc was present for the monumental day.
More on Lewis Hamilton as he starts life at Ferrari
👉 First Lewis Hamilton pictures emerge on first day as Ferrari driver
👉 The one piece of criticism you could never aim at Lewis Hamilton
The two will, however, see one another on Wednesday when they take part in a ‘wake-up’ test at Ferrari’s Fiorano circuit, weather dependent.
It will mark the first time the seven-time World Champion, whose F1 results include 105 Grand Prix wins, is in the same machinery as Leclerc. It will be, effectively, their first head-to-head comparison.
But while it won’t have any bearing on Ferrari’s F1 2025 plans, Leclerc has made it clear that if a Ferrari driver is going to fight Red Bull and Max Verstappen for the World title, it is going to be him.
“I feel like I’m ready for the championship,” he told RacingNews365. “We [Ferrari] just need a car that, throughout the season, is capable of doing that.
“I’m fully confident that the next team to be able to do that and to beat Red Bull, especially, for the championship will be us.”
For the past four seasons it’s been Verstappen, the Red Bull driver winning four World titles on the trot from 2021 to 2023.
Although Leclerc did offer a challenge in the first half of 2022, too many mistakes from both Ferrari and the driver cost him and he had to settle for runner-up.
He, however, believes in the last two years he has matured and improved as a driver.
“I did [improve],” said the 27-year-old. “I improved in the way that I accept more when a weekend is not going exactly the way I want.
“Whereas in the past, if things were not going exactly the way I want, if the car was not exactly the way I wanted, I was trying to find something within the car that was not there, and that was pushing me to do mistakes.
“That was pushing me also sometimes to do something really good when things were not there, but I felt like it was biting [me] more than it will reward me – and on that, I improved a lot.
“I felt like I maximised points a lot more over the course of the season, but that doesn’t mean that I will never cross that line again.
“It’s always a game of trying to get as close as possible to limit without ever stepping on it, but I feel like I’ve done a step forward on that, yes.”
Read next: Lewis Hamilton’s first message to Ferrari team revealed in rare behind-the-scenes footage