Charles Leclerc explains why ‘I need to be happy’ despite Ferrari’s first winless season since 2021

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Ferrari suffered a miserable time throughout the 2025 F1 season, as Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton only managed to take fifth and sixth in the drivers’ championship.

The Scuderia kicked off the campaign believing that this could finally be the year that ended with another title. Ferrari have not won the F1 drivers’ championship since Kimi Raikkonen’s triumph in 2007. The Maranello natives have also not won the constructors’ title since 2008.

But the grand hopes that team boss Fred Vasseur and Hamilton held upon the latter’s arrival at Ferrari at the start of 2025 quickly evaporated once they realised how much McLaren had developed over the winter. McLaren beat Ferrari to the teams’ title in 2024 by just 14 points.

Vasseur even stopped developing Ferrari’s 2025 car in April to focus their resources on their car for the 2026 F1 regulations. The Scuderia only brought one further major upgrade to the SF-25 over the rest of 2025. But Ferrari’s rear suspension upgrade in Belgium failed to help.

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc feels ‘I need to be happy’ with his personal growth in 2025

Ferrari failed to win a single Grand Prix for the first time since the 2021 campaign in 2025, as Leclerc also endured his fourth winless year in seven terms with the Scuderia. Hamilton also failed to secure a single Grand Prix podium for the first time in his 19-year F1 career in 2025.

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Leclerc still believes he needs to be “happy” with what he produced during the 2025 season, though. The 28-year-old is encouraged by the personal growth that he managed to realise in 2025, along with taking all seven of Ferrari’s Grand Prix podiums and their one pole position.

Leclerc told RACER: “It’s been a tough season, but I think my objective in every season I go into is trying to maximise whatever I have. That doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with the season, in a way that fighting for fourth, fifth or sixth is not something that I particularly enjoy.

“But looking back, I think it’s been a very strong season on my side. And for that, I need to be happy about it, still being extremely critical with myself and always trying to find ways to improve. But it’s been a strong season on my side.”

Charles Leclerc will hope Ferrari’s planned suspension change produces results in 2026

Double Charles Leclerc’s points tally and Ferrari would be second in the constructors’ championship

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Leclerc scored pole for the Hungarian Grand Prix in August, and he could have won the race were it not for Ferrari’s rear suspension upgrade at the previous round in Belgium failing to improve the SF-25’s chronic ride height problems that would plague their campaign all year.

Back in round two of 24 in March, Hamilton was disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix as his Ferrari suffered excessive plank wear. The Scuderia focused all of their remaining efforts on updates during 2025 on designing a potential cure, but it failed to deliver the needed fix.

Ultimately, Ferrari sacrificed winning the Hungarian GP to protect Leclerc’s plank, and gone with it also proved to be their only chance to win a Grand Prix in 2025. Ferrari continued to have to raise the ride height of Leclerc and Hamilton’s cars, at the expense of performance.

Now, Ferrari will use push-rod suspension in 2026, having moved to pull-rods in 2025 to try to unlock the last bits of performance from their car in the last season of the ground-effect regulations. There are, however, ongoing fears about Ferrari’s 2026 rules engine currently.