Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are racing back to the top of F1

The secluded Italian town of Maranello is separated from the nearby city of Bologna by a narrow, sun-blasted highway that is often busy with trucks. Transit is 50 minutes from Bologna airport if you drive mortal fashion, less if you do it the Maranello way, in imitation of local gods, making frequent drifts across the paint to pass. Maranello is home to that famed Italian car firm Ferrari, the place where the roadsters and racers have been manufactured since the 1940s and where its Formula 1 team, Scuderia Ferrari, is headquartered. Ferrari Land, I heard an English-speaking resident call this town of 17,000, before they went on to explain that there is no equivalent phrase in Italian, because if you mention Maranello in Italy, Ferrari is assumed. It’s said that you never forget your first visit; perhaps that’s because newcomers arrive grateful to have lived through the inbound ride.

Ferrari’s two current F1 racers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz – rising young stars of motorsport, their profiles lately magnified by the popular Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive – hold realistic ambitions to bring championship titles back to Maranello after many years of drought. But both made ignoble debuts in town, they confess. Leclerc, an alert and adroit 24-year-old from Monaco, got only as far as one of the entrances when he first came here. He was 11 or 12 at the time, brought along by a family friend who worked for Ferrari, but he was unable to enter the complex. “So I sat in the car park for two hours,” he remembers, “trying to guess what it was like inside. I imagined Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, y’know? With Oompa Loompas running around.” Leclerc’s teammate Sainz, a mild and polite Spaniard who was with a rival team when Ferrari sought him out, was introduced to Maranello under the cover of darkness. “A secret expedition,” says the 27-year-old, “because I was meant to wait for my contract with another team to end.” Sainz always yearned to sweep in through the entrance at the oldest, best-known team in Formula 1. “And I came in the back.”

After spending time with Ferrari’s drivers, I’ll come to realise that these twin stories speak to something fundamental in the nature of the two men. Leclerc is boyish, an enthusiast. Sainz is more modest and lightly brushed by melancholy. The day of my visit to meet Leclerc and Sainz is a working one for the drivers, who spend many of their weekday hours turning endless virtual circuits on a racing simulator and tending to other technical tasks. It’s agreed we’ll see one another after they knock off, coming together somewhere deeper in the warren of interconnected garages, hangars, offices, and design labs that form the Maranello compound. Which leaves me with a few hours to explore this eccentric one-company town on foot: Ferrari Land, indeed.

One monument, in the town’s centre, brings to life the team’s mascot, a horse that has pranced on the logo of flashy sports cars and snouty racers alike for 75 years. Nearby, the mother of a newborn pushes around a brilliant vermillion buggy. Her nappy bag matches. Rosso corsa, Ferrari’s molten shade of red, somewhere between an organic Gala apple and the digital cherries on a slot machine, is everywhere to be seen in Maranello. Mechanics lope to work in overalls dyed red, appropriately. A town history walk, studded with info panels that track the intertwined fortunes of Ferrari and Maranello back to World War II, is rendered apart from the ordinary pavement thanks to its rosso corsa asphalt. By the time you reach the Church of San Biagio, you’re so well brand-conditioned you quickly notice that Jesus, in one of the stained-glass panels, appears to be wearing Ferrari red.

There was once a priest in this region, Don Sergio Mantovani, who raced Ferraris in his spare time. He did so with a rosary clenched between his teeth. Years later, San Biagio’s priest would ring the church’s bells to signal team victories. Though that priest is gone, his successors have continued to rouse the town whenever a Ferrari driver takes a checkered flag somewhere around the world. The bells rang here in March, when Leclerc finished first in a season-opening race in Bahrain, and again in April, when he won in Australia – as they would ring twice more after wins by Sainz and Leclerc in July. Today it is late spring, Formula 1’s midseason, and Ferrari’s rivals have started to win more and more races against them. Even so, the mood is buoyant in Maranello. At last, residents sigh. A competitive car. Competitive drivers. Anybody who follows F1, or who watches the Netflix docuseries, will know that Ferrari’s competitiveness has not lately been a given.

Within the Ferrari compound, it is a shock to hear the team’s recent failures discussed freely. Past seasons were miserabile. Un disastro. So say executives in shirt sleeves as they down espressos. So say white-coated employees who’ve stepped outside laboratories to vape. Far from being disloyal, their frankness speaks to a present confidence that some corner has been turned, putting better days in sight, if not this season, then next. In a pristine hangar that’s devoted to the restoration of collectible Ferraris, a white-haired crew of veteran mechanics whistle to express satisfaction at the current state of affairs. Their swift boy racer, Leclerc, is a special favourite.

It is a blazing-hot afternoon. Several repainted Ferraris, manufactured in different eras, stretching back to the 1940s, have been wheeled out of the hangar. When a sudden storm closes in, bringing early darkness and enough rain to make a fountain of every gutter, the cars are rolled under an awning, closely reparked as though they are suburban pickups and 4x4s at some waterlogged fête. Inside, as rain hammers on the hangar’s roof, restoration continues on cars that include an F1 racer from the ’67 season. It never won a championship, this one. Still, the lovely vehicle gleams as if expecting praise. A glass-walled archive here holds technical documents for every Ferrari ever made in Maranello, its 15 Drivers’ Championship F1 cars included.

Now mechanics put aside their tools. The others set down cardboard cups of unfinished espresso and pocket their vape sticks. Leclerc and Sainz have finished work, and with cinematic timing they enter the hangar through pounding rain and purple lightning flashes. They are greeted warmly by the crew of vets, pulled close, chest against chest, as though to have their hearts steeled for the remainder of a season that’s on the brink. Leclerc cannot help himself. He wanders over to the gleaming ’67 racer, that beautiful, hopeless car that never won anything. With sympathy, having everything to prove himself, he strokes a hand over its polished body.

They are here to be fitted for clothes from a new Ferrari fashion collection. They will also sign some fan apparel, take photos with hard-working staff, and loll among the collectible cars to unwind and feel real again after hours inside a simulator or tending to technical concerns. “Toughest day of the week,” Sainz tells me. “You finish 150 laps and you cannot think.” He is doe-eyed, naturally handsome, though not one for mirrors, his hair lazily parted to the side today. He performs routine tasks such as pulling up his jeans or retying his shoes with the precise, considered movements of someone who has spent a lifetime handling very expensive objects that might break.

Leclerc’s famous good looks are sleeker and more polished than those of his teammate. You can easily imagine him as the prioritised singer in a boy band. He is well-liked by colleagues, and insists he would race in a lucky golden necklace that his mechanics clubbed together to buy him if not for the fire-safety regulations that forbid F1 drivers their jewellery. “When you’re seven years old, you win two races in a row, you think you’re unbeatable,” Leclerc says. “My father told me to always be humble, even in good moments, and especially when you feel you are unbeatable.”

He is trying on a red balaclava and a pair of gloves. Sainz wanders over to Leclerc and murmurs, “Beauuutiful.” They trash talk a bit, then fall into urgent, greedy discussion about a tough turn at an upcoming race, some wrinkle the simulator has thrown up. Every team in F1 fields two drivers. Except in rare cases, one or the other of these drivers is favoured internally. There is a number one. There is a number two. While Ferrari insists that they do not have a number-one driver, it appears to those on the outside that Leclerc is the preferred son, and Sainz, older by a few years, must play sidekick. Competitors placed in this strange, anti-sporting situation often come to loathe each other. These two are more like rivalrous schoolmates, says a Ferrari executive in the garage. “They’re close. Chat-chat-chat. They compete over everything: who can get to a toilet door first, everything. Then, chat-chat-chat.

You ache for Sainz, though. Ferrari is the top of the tree for F1 drivers. Likely, Leclerc will move on from here only if he fails and is shown the door. In order for Sainz to nurture title-winning hopes with Ferrari, he must by default nurse quieter hopes that his pal screws up. Sainz says that if he catches himself indulging in self-pity for any reason – “If on a given day I feel tired, or sad, or maybe something’s not quite right with me, if I’m in a bad mood and I don’t know why” – it is his habit to find a peaceful spot on the Maranello compound and repeat a mantra. “Shit,” it goes. “I’m a Ferrari driver. I’m in Maranello. I’m going to drive a simulator today. I’m going to test the car. And soon I’m gonna race.”

Racing, Leclerc agrees, offers the ultimate reset. He was a teenager in Formula 1’s feeder series when his beloved father, Hervé, passed away. Leclerc entered the next scheduled race, days after his bereavement, and won it. You sense these drivers will bear losses, disappointments, and indignities Monday through Thursday, as long as they get to pare away the blues at 200 mph on the weekend. For Sainz, the minor insults are everywhere if he cares to look. Handed a stack of pristine baseball caps in the garage, he scribbles his signature on the far side of each peak, automatically leaving room for Leclerc’s name to appear before his own. Although they are practically the same height, a cut-out tableau of the two drivers in central Maranello romantically imagines Leclerc a whole head taller.

Netflix’s Drive to Survive, a series that works hard to legitimise the experiences of constrained competitors outside of the elite group such as Sainz, has had a big impact on F1, enlarging the sport with new fans, changing the way that fans relate to drivers at every level. Leclerc has only really known a heightened Netflix era in his sport, which began in 2018. But Sainz has competed just long enough to notice the changed weather. “More people recognise you in the street,” he tells me, “more sponsors, more events, more pictures.” The life of a driver, he means, has become a whit less about the driving. He’s making headway through the baseball caps that need signing, and concludes: “More autographs, more risks of distraction.”

Sainz stands when he’s finished, carefully pinching the belt loop of his jeans, hiking the waistband higher. It’s loud in the hangar. Mechanics are testing one car that makes a sound like the sustained, trembling guitar chord that opens a rock concert. An older Ferrari has been raised up, with pieces of neat leather luggage still strapped to its roof rack, an incongruity that makes the nearest mechanics shout, “Sta andando in ferie!” (It’s going on holiday!) The guitar chord ends. Perhaps Sainz has been taking the moment to remind himself of that mantra, his counter to any self-pity. Shit, though! I’m here, in Maranello!

There is a vast two-storey Ferrari museum on-site, its rooms packed with immaculate cars, trophies, and memorabilia. The museum’s director, a dapper man named Michele Pignatti Morano, has already told Leclerc, Sainz, and their colleagues: “If you win us another championship, I will knock down walls for you.” Leading me on a tour, Pignatti Morano explains a Ferrari ritual: that some championship-winning cars are brought into this museum and parked forever on the carpeted banks of a room they call the Victory Hall. Melodramatic music plays here. Hardcore fans have been known to falter and weep. Pignatti Morano waves at a wall that could be demolished should they need the space for Leclerc’s or Sainz’s car. “I’ve told them, ‘Do not use me as an excuse,’ ” Pignatti Morano says.

Elsewhere in the museum, visitors are invited to admire the preserved desk and favourite ashtray of the company founder, Enzo Ferrari, who was born in 1898 and who started to flourish as a racer and designer of fast cars in the 1920s and ’30s. According to one of his biographers, the American sportswriter Brock Yates, Enzo was devoted to “the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name.” It was a devotion that sometimes worked to the detriment of his company’s commercial aims, writes Yates. Those lovely coupes and cabriolets that started rolling out of the Maranello factories in the 1940s and ’50s, straight into consumer-automobile legend – they were nothing to Enzo when compared to his beloved F1 racers, each of which he saw as a next child, the piecemeal embodiment of ego. Obsessed as he was with winning, he seldom travelled to a race and hardly ever left the Maranello area. The work of increasing his racing cars’ speeds, season after season, came with a human cost. In the late 1950s, the Vatican became so worried about the mounting deaths of Ferrari drivers that its newspaper likened Enzo to a Saturn, “devour[ing] his own sons.”

In his book Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, Yates reported that there was enough papal rapprochement for the Ferrari boss to give his final confession to Pope John Paul II via telephone before dying in 1988 at age 90. Yates goes on to suggest that when Enzo passed away, there was a sense of anticlimax in the town that he raised up from rural obscurity. Birds kept singing in Maranello. Gravity held! Formula 1 races carried on too, as they always do, pausing but never halting because of tragedy.

From the 1990s, Ferrari without Ferrari experienced periods of failure and success – the most dizzying between ’00 and ’04 when that superb German driver Michael Schumacher won five championships in a row. The company’s consumer division was tended more deliberately too, and by the 2010s, Ferrari had been squarely positioned beside the likes of Gucci and Hermès, a signifier of much more than plain quickness. Ferrari’s fashion collections, first launched in 2021, are part of several brand expansions over time. Soon, the company will begin selling an SUV.

In the museum, Pignatti Morano leads me through to a display of supercars, the majority of which are on loan from rich owners. Slim chance this museum could afford to buy back such pieces for posterity. Ferrari’s road cars are manufactured with calculated scarcity, and the values of vintage models explode on the secondary market. Standing near a 2013 supercar that rises as far off the ground as his pockets, Pignatti Morano waits for a young visitor to come along – then dramatically pulls open the car’s butterfly door, inviting the incredulous boy to hop in and get a very brief taste of seven-figure luxury. The child alights after a minute, looking dazed, bug-eyed, as though he’s done 150 laps on a mind-frying simulator. If the aim of luxury branding is to make people take leave of their senses, Ferrari has achieved this as well as any company on earth.

In a room devoted to tailor-made cars that are priced at what Pignatti Morano calls “don’t ask” sums, we find a boatlike vehicle that catches the eye because of its unusual shape and a glaring missing part. No windshield. Pignatti Morano explains that a raised design feature in front of the steering wheel is meant to push incoming air over the driver’s forehead instead. And this works? “Should do!” he answers, adding, “I haven’t tried it. You, uh, need to wear a helmet for this one.”

Are Ferraris ever funny? The answer depends on personal taste, a tolerance for extravagance in particular. What is clear is that a brand such as Ferrari, fixed at the unsmiling apex of the luxury-goods market, has a lot to lose by ever looking silly. More so than its rivals in motorsport, Ferrari has a conjoined cool to protect, and this means a strained relationship with athletic trash talk, jokes. Netflix captured this well in a 2021 episode that focused on a former Ferrari driver, the four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel. The team didn’t live up to its – or his – high standards during Vettel’s era. It ran on reputational fumes, and Vettel was inclined to be wry and funny about this in his public comments. In one scene, captured by cameras, he was instructed not to be too jokey in a promotional video. Vettel jibed: “So is that the credo for this weekend, ‘Don’t laugh?’ ”

For the outsider, plunged into Maranello’s melodrama, this can seem like the credo for the whole operation. Don’t laugh. Revere the red. Bite a rosary and whiz along for the ride. There are sports franchises that are obsessed with competitiveness, where the prime concern is crushing the next lot. And there are sports franchises, no less ambitious in a general sense, where the obsessional gaze points inward. In football, think Liverpool and Arsenal. These teams are the same as Ferrari, in that the intensity of their self-reverence brings on a vicarious reverence from the rest of us. Nonpartisans root for these teams, if only so that reality comes to fit snugger against the giddy stories they tell about themselves. The prospect of a Ferrari revival in Formula 1 is delicious and thrilling for everyone except the meanest sourpusses.

And were Leclerc to win the title for them! You feel sure this kid would do it with qualities much lacking in Maranello: a bit of cheek and an appreciation of F1’s absurdity. Like many elite competitors, Leclerc has a high tolerance for repetition, technical data, seated strain; yet to his credit he has not let this deaden a mischievous streak. As soon as he gets his helmet off, postrace, he likes to look around the weighing room and see from the other drivers’ faces, who’s up for a chat? When he was about to win his first race of the 2022 season, this past spring, he radioed his pit crew to yell that he’d suffered a mechanical fault (no-o-o!). It seemed like he wouldn’t make the finish line after all. There was a moment of stunned horror in the pit wall. Leclerc was messing with them. Never make this kind of joke again, he was ordered.

In the hangar, as classic cars are spruced and renewed all around, I ask him about that juvenile first image he had of the Ferrari compound. He once pictured Wonka-like magic taking place beyond the gate, industrious Oompa Loompas everywhere. Has the adult reality been underwhelming, set against an adolescent’s imagination? Leclerc, in answer, gestures around the garage, where seamstresses restitch ancient leather seats and a convertible worth £6.5 million has been plucked to bits by mechanics, its engine forged over from scratch. Wonkas, Oompa Loompas, all the employees here help turn unlikely ideas into something tangible. “It’s beyond what I imagined,” he says.

During my visit to Maranello, the Ferrari publicists made it clear they would not tolerate their drivers being questioned about getting injured or dying in the course of the job. Now, in the garage, Leclerc brings up the forbidden subject himself – better to explain how much he relishes being here. His mother sometimes telephones, scared, Leclerc says. That friend of the family – Charles’s godfather and the person who first brought him to Maranello – was a young trainee racer named Jules Bianchi. Later, Bianchi graduated to become a full-fledged F1 driver. He died as the result of a crash, in 2014, at the age of 25.

Leclerc’s younger brother, Arthur, is a racer as well. The family has been, and continues to be, exposed to risk. There is nowhere to hide from it. It can seem like audience interest in F1 races is highest at the start when collisions are more common; interest afterwards appears to jag up and down, as and when accidents are reported on social media. Netflix, inclined to treat drivers as real people with real families, still foregrounds the crashes repeatedly and in slow motion. Are Ferraris ever funny? Not for the parents, not for the partners.

“So it’s tough on my mother,” Leclerc says. “And I don’t know what to tell her. Other than: I love what I do. There’s nothing in particular I can say to make her feel better. I’m not going to say I’ll be careful. That wouldn’t be true. I’m going to give it my best, whatever. She knows: It’s a dangerous sport. It’s got massively safer through the years. But it will remain forever a dangerous sport.” Leclerc offers an incongruous smile. There’s a faint piratical glint in his eye. “She knows,” he says, “I’m the happiest once I’m in that car.”

Credits: gq-magazine.co.uk