Leclerc ‘just prayed’ wedged between Hamilton and Verstappen in Mexico Turn 1 mayhem
Charles Leclerc didn’t dress it up. The opening seconds of the Mexican Grand Prix were not fun, not brave, not heroic. They were survival.
Ferrari’s lead man found himself wedged between his new teammate Lewis Hamilton and old sparring partner Max Verstappen as the field screamed down that endless Mexico City main straight. Lando Norris, starting from pole, dragged them four-wide into Turn 1. Verstappen clattered the kerb, Hamilton and Leclerc banged wheels, and the Ferrari pair were spat into the run-off. It looked like the sort of squeeze that usually ends in carbon.
“I didn’t enjoy that at all,” Leclerc said afterwards, half-laughing, half-exhaling. “I normally quite like fighting, but in this case, being in the middle of Lewis and Max… you can’t do much. You just pray they give you enough space to make the corner.”
He didn’t quite get that much. Verstappen, bottoming out over the inside kerb, straight-lined the chicane. Leclerc, finding no grip on the dirty outside and tagged by Hamilton’s sister Ferrari, had to cut the corner too. Somehow, all three cars came out intact. The roars in the Foro Sol were matched by a collective paddock blink of disbelief.
From there, the afternoon split in two. Norris checked out, stretching a lead that would balloon to half a minute by the flag. Leclerc settled into second, but never with much comfort. His mediums never switched on, leaving him glancing in the mirrors at a Red Bull that simply refused to fade.
Verstappen had rolled the dice on a one-stop with an aggressive soft-tyre opening stint, and it kept him in range when it mattered. The reigning champion’s pace late on had the tension ratcheting up, Ferrari recalculating and Leclerc wondering if he should have committed to two stops after all.
“Especially with those medium tyres, the feeling was just not there from the beginning to the end,” Leclerc admitted. “I was definitely tempted by the two stops… In the end I stuck with the plan, tried to make it work, and we did. It was close. We got a little bit lucky, but I’m proud we made it stick.”
Luck arrived wearing a fluorescent panel: a late Virtual Safety Car to cover Carlos Sainz’s retirement. It bled the sting from the chase and left Leclerc to defend for just half a lap once racing resumed. He clung on to second, Verstappen third, while Norris sailed off into the sunset with the kind of authoritative win McLaren has been threatening at altitude.
Hamilton, meanwhile, had a lumpier afternoon in the other Ferrari. He crossed the line eighth after a penalty was slapped on for a later skirmish with Verstappen, a 10-second add-on that capped a messy end to his race. The raw speed is there in the SF-25; the execution on Sundays still needs polishing.
For Ferrari, the net result mattered: with Leclerc’s podium and Hamilton’s salvage job, the Scuderia nudged back into second in the Constructors’ standings. It’s a slim margin — a single point over Mercedes — with four rounds left on the 2025 calendar. Given how narrow that Turn 1 was for Leclerc, even a point feels like daylight.
If there’s a takeaway from Mexico, it’s that Ferrari survived a race that could easily have broken the other way on lap one. Leclerc’s composure, and a bit of timely VSC fortune, kept Verstappen’s late charge at bay. Norris and McLaren were in a different zip code; that’s the next problem. But when your driver comes off the podium talking about prayer and relief, you bank the 18 points and move on.
Next stop, a very different challenge. And, with this constructors’ fight now breathing down Ferrari’s neck, there won’t be much praying — just a lot of hard graft to make sure Mexico’s chaos turns into momentum rather than a warning.
