In 2006, while leading the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix, Kimi Räikkönen’s silver McLaren caught fire. The steely Finnish driver pulled over to the side of the track, lifted himself out of his car, and as race officials rushed to put out the flames, calmly removed his helmet, brushed off the debris, walked straight to his yacht in the nearby marina, and watched the rest of the race from a hot tub.
This is the world of Formula One, where opulence is just one step away from tragedy, fortunes can turn in a heartbeat, and drivers are worshipped as gods.
With an estimated 445 million annual viewers, Formula One is a juggernaut worth billions of dollars. There are 24 annual races, spread over 21 countries and five continents. Unlike any other sport with a similar audience, Formula One is a traveling league, with the entire operation picking up and moving to a different country each race weekend. There are only 10 teams, with two drivers each. Even though an individual team has up to 2,000 employees and a yearly budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, its entire success boils down to the drivers, and, even then, really just the lead driver.
Räikkönen went on to achieve the goal of every racer: a seat with Ferrari, the winningest team in the history of Formula One. And in 2007, he won the Drivers’ Championship, the highest award in all of motorsports, by just a single point. Then, in 2009, he was unceremoniously dumped. Ferrari decided Räikkönen was underperforming—he had slipped from third place in 2008 down to sixth—and the Finn was cast out of Formula One, going on to try his hand at NASCAR and the World Rally Championship. Ferrari hasn’t won a Drivers’ Championship since.
This cutthroat dynamic, in which drivers are treated as near-mythic figures and then quickly discarded, will be showcased on September 1, as the Scuderia Ferrari—literally, the Ferrari Stables—seeks to capture a win at the Italian Grand Prix, its home race, for only the second time in 14 years.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of red-clad tifosi—the name given to Italian supporters, a word translating to “fanatics”—descend on the track at Monza, just north of Milan, to shout and cry and cheer on the team to which they are devoted. Polls have shown that more than half of all Italians—roughly 30 million in a country of 59 million—are avid fans of Ferrari, and all of their hopes are pinned on one man: Ferrari’s lead driver, Charles Leclerc.
The team’s entire success boils down to its drivers, and, even then, really just the lead driver.
A broad-shouldered, square-jawed 26-year-old who grew up on the monied streets of Monaco, Leclerc was just 10 years old when Ferrari won its last Drivers’ Championship. He has been its best hope since then. He won the Italian Grand Prix for Ferrari back in 2019 and is currently in the form of his life. Earlier this year he became the first Monegasque driver to win the historic Monaco Grand Prix, setting expectations of a win in the Italian Grand Prix higher than ever.
In recent years, with the rise of social media and the influx of younger fans (helped, in part, by the popular Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive), Formula One drivers have amassed huge followings, with fans developing the sort of starstruck relationships most typically associated with actors or pop singers.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel two years ago, Leclerc catalogued a “day in the life” for his nearly nine million viewers. It showed the well-toned athlete leaping into turquoise water from the deck of a yacht, darting around in an open-topped supercar, and ending the day on a private jet. “This guy is living every young man’s dream lifestyle,” reads the top comment.
But the nature of fame in Formula One is fickle. Drivers can reach extraordinary heights and then disappear in an instant. Kamui Kobayashi, one of the most talented drivers in the late 2000s, vanished from the scene after he couldn’t find a team to hire him. Robert Kubica, who won a race in his very first season—a rare feat—never returned to prominence after sustaining injuries in a 2011 crash. In Formula One, your reputation and your life are directly tied to how you perform on the track. There are few jobs in the world that are at once so hallowed and so easy to lose.
Indeed, Charles Leclerc is a temporary savior. For the last five years, he has occupied the Ferrari-lead-driver spotlight that Räikkönen and legends such as Michael Schumacher and Niki Lauda inhabited before him. But next year he will be demoted to second driver. His replacement? Sir Lewis Hamilton, the most successful racer in the history of Formula One.
The reasons are clear: Hamilton has won seven Drivers’ Championships. Leclerc has won none. Hamilton has won 105 grand prix. Leclerc has won only six. Although he will be teammates with Hamilton, Leclerc’s demotion is a significant step down. The second driver gets less support, Leclerc’s car will get upgrades only after Hamilton’s, and in a close race he may well be ordered by his team to let Hamilton pass him.
Leclerc will assume the place of his current racing partner, Carlos Sainz, whose contract was canceled to make room for the British superstar. “The situation has changed completely,” Sainz lamented in an interview recently. Once considered a top driver, Sainz, who got a contract extension just last year, will soon be driving for the perpetual also-ran Williams Racing. Exiled to the back of the pack, he will begin the difficult process of working his way up all over again, hoping, like Räikkönen did after seven years of toil, to reclaim a seat at Ferrari.
Leclerc wants nothing more than to avoid that fate. For the insanely competitive drivers who have made it to the top of their sport, being stuck in an uncompetitive car is agonizing. A number of racers have chosen to leave the sport entirely rather than sink into mediocrity. Leclerc’s future will now rest on his performance in the two-hour-long race at Monza next weekend. He will show up to the race to overwhelming applause and, for one day, will be Italy’s hero. Winning would be a coup, one that would ensure he and Hamilton are on nearly level ground in the year to come. But losing will send him one step closer to irrelevance.
In Formula One, everything is transient—your fame, your driving seat, and even your life. Leclerc knows this all too well. He won his first Formula One race the same weekend his close friend and up-and-coming junior driver Anthoine Hubert died in a fatal crash during a Formula Two race. The sixth anniversary of Hubert’s death will fall on the eve of the Italian Grand Prix.
Theo Baker is a junior at Stanford University and the recipient of a 2022 George Polk Award in journalism
