Martin Brundle has warned Charles Leclerc will “take some beating” at Ferrari this season, as Lewis Hamilton gets set for his Scuderia debut.
Both Ferrari drivers were at Fiorano last week for the team’s traditional ‘wake-up’ test, with Hamilton’s eagerly-anticipated first laps in red watched by hundreds of fans outside the team’s in-house test track.
Hamilton and Leclerc shared testing duties at Fiorano in a 2023 Ferrari as they got their first running of the season under their belts, as they gear up for their stint together as team-mates.
It is an in-team battle many are looking forward to seeing unfold, with Hamilton arriving at Maranello holding many outright records along with his seven World Championships, while Leclerc comes into the year off the back of his highest-scoring season to date in Formula 1, alongside three race victories.
Former F1 driver Brundle thinks that, with fewer mistakes now showing, Leclerc will be a strong opponent for Hamilton.
“I never underestimate Lewis Hamilton,” Brundle said on Sky Sports News, “but Charles Leclerc is fast, there’s no doubt about it, and he’s stopped crashing a little bit, because he had a bit of a habit of overdriving himself in the car and hitting the wall a bit too frequently.
“But Charles is the real deal now, and he’ll take some beating. He really will.”
Hamilton took in 30 laps of Fiorano last week and is set for another run in a previous Ferrari this week alongside his new team-mate, this time at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with the Scuderia having reportedly booked the track for three days as their drivers prepare for the year ahead.
The seven-time World Champion had said in the aftermath of his Fiorano test that his first laps in red were among “one of the best feelings of my life”, and Brundle added that will likely have been due to the “special” nature of becoming a Ferrari driver.
“I read that story from Lewis, and when that garage door opened at Fiorano, the test track, and he went out, and I’ve done that for Sky F1 in Ferraris, when we were making TV pieces,” Brundle explained.
“I’ve not raced one, I did write to Ferrari once and asked if they’d put me in the car, and they said no, when I was a youngster in Formula 3, but there’s something so special about the Prancing Horse, about Ferrari.
“You’re driving for a country, not just a team there, and all the expectations of that, and the politics and media that go with that can be challenging.
“I mean, it’s a carbon fibre chassis that happens to be painted red instead of silver or black, as it was at Mercedes – but somehow it matters. It’s different.”
