Charles Leclerc: "I imagined Maranello as the Chocolate Factory"

• Sports

Charles Leclerc talked about his past about him, when he was about eleven years old, and, brought to Maranello by a family friend who worked for Ferrari, he was unable to enter. He explained: "I sat in the parking lot for two hours, and tried to guess what was going on in there.

I pictured it as in the movie The Chocolate Factory, with the Umpa Lumpa around. My family? My mother's concern she's great. And I don't know what to tell her. Besides the fact that I love my job. There's nothing in particular I can add to make her feel better.

I won't tell her I'll be careful. It would be a lie. I'll do my best, in Anyway. You know it well: it's a dangerous sport. Over the years it has become much safer, but it will always remain an activity where risk exists. But you know that I'm the happiest man in the world when I'm in the car.

" Carlos Sainz, the other Ferrari driver, also talked in the same interview of Leclerc. He told: "My arrival in Ferrari? A secret expedition, because I had to wait for the expiration of my contract with McLaren. But the desire to drive the Red was very strong: I entered from the back."

Curiosities about Charles Leclerc

Son of Hervé, a Formula 3 driver in the 1980s and 1990s, who died prematurely in 2017 at the age of 54, after a long illness, four days before Charles won the Azerbaijan Formula One Grand Prix 2.

Charles has an older brother, Lorenzo, and a younger brother, Arthur, who is also a driver for the Ferrari Driver Academy. During his childhood Leclerc had a close friendship with the late driver from Nice Jules Bianchi, who was also his godfather.

Leclerc started racing with karts on the track managed by Bianchi's father, in Brignoles; like Bianchi, Leclerc also joined the ARM management company managed by Nicolas Todt. Since he has been in Formula 1 he has raced with 16 as the race number, his birthday as well as the sum (1 + 6) of his favorite number, 7, however already occupied by Kimi Räikkönen when Leclerc arrived in the circus.

Leclerc was engaged from January 2015 to September 2019 with the Neapolitan Giada Gianni, residing in the Principality since she was a child and an economics student at the University of Monaco. To date, Leclerc is engaged in a relationship with the Monegasque Charlotte Siné, an architecture student at the University of Nantes and daughter of Emmanuel Siné, general manager of the Société des Bains de Mer, a company that manages all the entertainment in the Principality.