Leclerc canceling out the 'noise' but still not sure he's over car struggles after Silverstone win

Charles Leclerc says his struggles with the 2026 Ferrari car have been so big that he is not letting himself believe he has overcome them solely based on his British Grand Prix victory.

Ferrari has regularly been Mercedes’ nearest challenger this season, but after Leclerc started the year with two podiums in the opening three rounds, it was Lewis Hamilton who looked the more comfortable of the two drivers. With Hamilton securing three podiums and a victory in his last five races, Leclerc returned to the top step for the first time since 2024 at Silverstone, and referenced negative narratives as something he’s had to battle with as well as his feeling inside the car.

“I don't know if [the negativity] fuels me,” Leclerc said. “Honestly, I think anybody that says that would lie. I think whenever there's so much negativity around, it's not something so nice to see.

“You try to cancel the noise as much as possible. I try to not look at my phone and focus on what is relevant and in order to also have the right picture of the situation, because things are said and you go from hero to zero, from zero to hero, in like two days in this sport, and so it can influence then the way you see a situation.

“So no, my job was really to just try and cancel that noise, to not look at anything, to not listen to anything. And I know that I didn't become a bad driver from one day to the other. It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car.”

Ferrari failed to score a podium finish in Austria for only the second time this season, but bounced back with first and third in Great Britain, something Leclerc insists was unexpected.

“I think [Silverstone] was a particularly big surprise for the whole team,” he said. “Not the win, just the overall performance. I mean, we were a lot faster than what we thought, and I think as much as we need to analyze when things are going a lot worse than expected, we also need to analyze when things go a lot better than expected.

“Coming into the weekend, I remember the meetings that we've done on Thursday and we kind of thought we would be six tenths, five tenths off, minimum. And we were much better than that, and we actually won. So it's a very special feeling.”