Two Leclercs on a Friday? Ferrari’s bringing the family back to Yas Marina.
Arthur Leclerc will take Lewis Hamilton’s seat for FP1 at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, sharing the track with big brother Charles for the second time in Formula 1. It’s a neat little bookend to Ferrari’s bruising 2025 campaign, and a reminder that Maranello’s long game is still about nurturing talent as much as it is chasing lap time.
We’ve seen this picture before. Twelve months ago, Arthur rolled out of the pit lane to become the second Leclerc to contest a Formula 1 session, finishing P18 and 1.858s shy of Charles. No great surprise there; rookie FP1s are usually about data gathering, not headlines. But it mattered to Ferrari, and to the brothers. Charles said back then he didn’t need many words with Arthur: he knew what he felt, he knew he’d do the job. That quiet confidence inside the garage goes a long way.
This time, Arthur steps in for Hamilton as part of Ferrari’s FP1 programme. The 25-year-old isn’t a stranger to the red cars; after leaving the Ferrari Driver Academy in 2023, he pivoted to a development role with the Scuderia and balanced that work with GT duty for AF Corse in the World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup this season. He’s spent much of the year in the simulator, and Ferrari likes to validate sim pace against the real thing at Yas Marina. Correlation, correlation, correlation — and a nice family subplot for good measure.
The weekend doesn’t end with the chequered flag either. Ferrari’s post-season running will be split three ways: Charles Leclerc and Hamilton will divide the main end-of-year testing duties, including the car adapted for 2026 tyre work, while the current SF-25 in young-driver trim goes to Dino Beganovic. The Swede has already had two FP1 outings in 2025 — Bahrain and Austria — both times subbing for Charles. It’s a clear signpost of the internal ladder: Arthur gets the Friday mileage in Abu Dhabi, Beganovic gets the official young-driver test, and the race drivers close the loop on development before winter.
Context matters here. Ferrari arrives at the finale locked into P4 in the Constructors’ standings, out of reach of the team ahead with too few points left to overturn the gap. It’s been a slog of a season by Ferrari standards — not a single grand prix win — and team principal Fred Vasseur isn’t dressing it up.
“Abu Dhabi brings a long and challenging season to a close, for the drivers and for everyone in the team,” Vasseur said. “At Yas Marina, we will push until the very end, with the whole team aiming to finish the Championship on a positive note.”
A positive note on Friday would be clean, efficient mileage and a car that doesn’t need fire-fighting before qualifying. For Arthur, the target is simple: deliver the run plan, keep it tidy, feed back what the simulator says he should be feeling. For Ferrari, the upside of having both Leclercs on track, even briefly, is the kind of direct comparison that helps engineers tick or tear up assumptions before the winter shift to the 2026 project ramps up.
There’s also the Hamilton factor. The seven-time champion sits out FP1, but he’ll split the post-season test with Charles, including time in the car configured for the new tyre work. If Ferrari’s 2025 car has been a stubborn puzzle, those miles are valuable — not as a silver bullet, but as connective tissue between a frustrating year and the radical reset coming.
So Friday will be a rarity: two Leclercs, one Ferrari garage, one hour to make it all count. No promises of fireworks. Just a family cameo with a professional edge, and a team trying to wring every useful drop from the season’s final laps.
