Okay, confession. We didn’t get a huge amount of Ask Dre questions last time I put the word out. But I did get a good one from TheGhostRaptor that, for me, warranted a full post. Might do this more often if I get a compelling enough topic as this was fun to do and I’d like to have more writing projects in-between races. The question…
Who is the better driver in F1, Charles Leclerc or Lando Norris?
This is a tough one, and seems to be off the back of a lot of recent discourse in regards to Charles Leclerc in particular and this season with Ferrari now Lewis Hamilton has settled into his second season in red.
I’ll be honest here, for a good while, I leaned towards Charles on this one. I think it was that X-Factor of being such a spectacular talent and being able to demonstrate that so often with a Ferrari outfit that never truly felt like a contender.
One of the biggest criticisms I see of Charles is that he only has eight wins in eight years with Ferrari. To which I say, there’s a boatload of mitigating circumstances to dissect here. First of all, he’s had a very tough slate of teammates that were good enough on their own to split victories with (Carlos Sainz, Sebastian Vettel and now Lewis Hamilton).
Second of all, the opportunities for him to win were limited. Charles joined Ferrari in 2019, right in the midst of Hamilton’s second reign of terror. Pricing it up:
2019 – Mercedes won 15 of 21 races, arguably Hamilton’s best season
2020 – Mercedes won 13 out of 17, Lewis alone going 11 of 16
2021 – Hamilton vs Verstappen almost exclusively lock out 1st and 2nd, doing so 13 times in 21 races
2022 – Red Bull wins 17 out of 22, including 9 in a row down the stretch
2023 – Red Bull fails to win just once in Singapore in one of the most dominant seasons ever
2024 – Verstappen controls early on before McLaren takes over, Ferrari scrap their way to 5 wins
2025 – Lol, no.
So opportunities were scarce here. The BEST of Ferrari’s seasons in that tenure, was the five win season of 2024, and Leclerc and Sainz split them 3-2. Which leads me to my other main point – You need a car regularly #1 in the rankings to have the best chance of winning races, let alone World Championships. When in that above block has Charles had the best car? The nearest I’ll entertain was the first half of 2022 when they were going back and forth with Red Bull, but it was still littered with explosions (Spain, a double DNF in Baku and Austria), and gross incompetence in Monaco, turning a 1-2 start into a 2-4 finish.
But of course, we don’t remember the Ferrari for that before Technical Directive 39 and the cure for all porpoising. We remember it by Charles Leclerc spinning into the wall at Paul Ricard and screaming, because we as fans will talk about human error as part of the agenda against Charles, way more than the fallacies of a car that failed to win in the back half of the year. And I think because Charles has been good for maybe 1-2 high profile errors a year, it sticks with him, unfairly.
For me, the more telling stat with Charles is the fact he has 27 pole positions. Two away from entering the Top 10 of all-time. That says to me that on raw speed, Leclerc is one of the fastest drivers we’ve ever had. And again, he’s done that with two hall-of-fame teammates and Carlos Sainz, a hall of very gooder. And did I mention that he’s only had one losing season to a teammate in his career – Sainz in 2021, and he was only five and a half points back.
No, what Charles Leclerc exemplifies to me is individual brilliance, in spite of the fact that Ferrari has been in a dry-spell long enough to legally drink in the UK for how long it’s been since their last championship. They’ve been a structural mess internally and externally, with glimpses of promise tarred by moments of incompetence. Team bosses, reshuffles, and reboots, and while they’ve had near misses (2010, 2012, 2017, 2024), there’s always been a stench of “honse” around Ferrari when you wait for the Concrete Donkey to land on their heads.
Lando Norris didn’t have to worry about that, and I think that’s why in the eyes of many, he’s leapt ahead in this race. Lando was still a really exciting driver to have joined F1, but George Russell winning the F2 title took some of the hype away in a triple British (sort of, Albon repping his mother’s Thailand, etc.) promotion.
We all knew it was destiny that Charles was going to Ferrari, especially after Jules Bianchi’s passing. Russell and Norris had the luxury of joining teams with low expectations instead. Charles was in Ferrari in his second season, its youngest factory driver in nearly 60 years. Lando Norris was a step behind for the first couple of years as McLaren were in their awkward emo Renault phase. No-one was expecting him to topple Carlos Sainz Jr when he was so young too. It was really in 2021 when he smashed Daniel Ricciardo and nearly won the Russian Grand Prix when I think people really started taking notice.
For me, the issues I have with Lando has been his handling of Oscar Piastri. This isn’t a huge issue, as Piastri is an exceptional talent. Run a train through the juniors and was fast immediately when he joined the team as he didn’t have to untangle a bunch of stylistic knots like Ricciardo struggled with. By Year 2, they were trading blows in qualifying speed. When you’re the senior guy in the team with half a decade of experience behind you, that’s going to raise an eyebrow.
2025 was the quintessential Lando Norris experience. He took a huge amount of blows in the first third of the season before McLaren changed his front suspension geometry after the Canadian Grand Prix and the smash into Piastri down the stretch. He was a different driver after that, taking down the 30+ point deficit Piastri had built up and holding off Verstappen for the World Title. And I think because his title win felt like a tertiary story with Piastri and a very vocal minority screaming conspiracy and Verstappen nearly closing in a 104-point margin, I think the Norris fans dug deeper to highlight their man.
Personally, I loved his resilience, and the fact he’s turned being vulnerable and openly talking about his mental health and struggles to do his job, and turned it into his superpower. He proved there was another way to win in one of sport’s biggest hotbeds for male chauvinism and power dynamics. And the fact he’s being talked about in the same circles as Verstappen now he’s on the outside looking in on a long-shot title fight, while Piastri has struggled in race trim, says a lot. It says people are listening. I think people are not putting him in that #2 driver conversation now Piastri, Leclerc and Russell have all had their fair share of difficulties this season.
If McLaren’s comeback holds (And I’m not sure on this one, Monza is next and I think Mercedes is going to bring hell), even a narrow defeat would mean even more flowers for Lando. Maybe even more than the world title he won. Reminds me a lot of Jenson Button, who won the 2009 title in stunning fashion, but I think his true masterpiece was his 2011 season when he was the only man in Sebastian Vettel’s postcode. Just me who thinks that?
Anyway, if I had to choose, I think it’s Charles. I think he’s just been in this elite, rarefied air for longer. He had to come out swinging against Sebastian Vettel early on and ultimately won that fight, and has made Ferrari his own. Even now, he’s shoulder to shoulder to Lewis Hamilton, arguably the greatest to ever do it. I just think that body of work is a little bit stronger over time. But I also think Norris has closed that gap in the last three years and will only get closer if he finishes off what’s been a very strong 2026 for him so far.
Let me know what you think somewhere on the Internet, as I think there’s a compelling case for both.
