Charles Leclerc may have finally broken the ‘Monaco Curse’ last season by winning his home race for the first time but the Monegasque’s horrid record of misfortune at the Principality has left a catalog of incidents that he would not like to revisit.
One such incident was back in 2022, when he had the honor of driving Niki Lauda’s 1974 Ferrari F1 car through the narrow and twisty streets of Monaco. Leclerc crashed the Ferrari 312 T4 during a presentation run for the Monaco Historic GP at La Rascasse.
Speaking on the Jay Shetty podcast last year, the #16 driver finally revealed what led to that unfortunate mistake. “I’ve actually driven the Niki Lauda car,” he told the host. “That was very, very special [but] unfortunately I had a problem on the car, while driving, on the brakes,” he revealed.
Leclerc crashes Lauda’s Ferrari at Monaco. The curse continues. pic.twitter.com/HdxYkiGTjq
— ESPN F1 (@ESPNF1) May 15, 2022
That little shunt with the barriers took the rear wing right off the Ferrari. Leclerc has had a fair share of his issues with F1 machinery in Monaco, having a crash or retirement every year until 2022, when he finished the Monaco GP for the first time, with the elusive victory coming two years later.
But the brake failure and the damage just stand testament to how dangerous and fragile the older era of F1 cars were and how brave the drivers like Lauda were to hustle them year after year.
Leclerc understands that contrast and highlighted how he had to press the clutch every time he had to shift to gears, which isn’t the case in modern F1 cars due to everything being electronically connected. Having driven the Lauda’s iconic Ferrari, the Monegasque would have started to respect the older generation drivers even more.
Leclerc feels the movie ‘Rush’ accurately represents F1’s older era
It won’t be hard to imagine that Leclerc is a fan of Lauda’s portrayal by actor Daniel Bruhl in the movie ‘Rush’ which charted his rivalry with McLaren’s James Hunt during the 1976 F1 season. But there’s another reason why the #16 driver is in love with that movie.
“I think it’s a really good representation of what the sport was back then. I love the movie,” he adds. Leclerc was referring to how dangerous the cars were and how the drivers who were willing to die were often the quickest out on track.
That said, the Ferrari driver admitted that the sport has changed a lot from those years. Despite there always being a quantum of risk involved, the safety standards in the sport have improved hugely. After Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994, the sport took many efforts to reduce fatalities.
Since then, the only driver fatality in F1 has been the death of Leclerc’s godfather, Jules Bianchi who died after sustaining injuries during the 2014 Japanese GP — where he slid under a recovery truck on track during a Safety Car period under treacherous wet conditions at the Suzuka International Circuit.
