Riccardo Patrese doesn’t deal in hedged bets. Ask the 71-year-old what it really takes to go toe-to-toe with Max Verstappen and he doesn’t wander. Even with Lando Norris crowned the new world champion, Patrese says the driver who could truly match Verstappen in equal machinery isn’t wearing papaya — it’s Charles Leclerc.
In a frank appraisal of F1’s current pecking order, the six-time grand prix winner calls Leclerc the only active driver operating on Verstappen’s wavelength. Not because Norris’ title means any less — the McLaren driver won the 2025 crown by two points over Verstappen, with Woking also toppling Red Bull for the constructors’ — but because Patrese sees a skillset in Leclerc that’s been capped by circumstance.
“Carletto,” as Patrese affectionately calls him, has been living on a diet of maybes at Ferrari. The Monégasque has finished runner-up in the Drivers’ Championship twice — in 2022 behind Verstappen and again in 2024, this time trailing Verstappen and Norris — without ever having the season-long weapon to scare the full field. In 2022, he was a distant second; the 2024 campaign was tighter at the front, but it still wasn’t a genuine title push from Maranello.
Patrese points the finger squarely at Ferrari’s side of the garage rather than Leclerc’s. The mistakes we do see, he argues, come from a driver overreaching to bridge a gap that shouldn’t exist. Give him a car that bites like Red Bull’s did in its pomp or McLaren’s did this past season, and you’d find the fight Verstappen has rarely had to take on over the last few years.
This isn’t a controversial reading inside the paddock. Leclerc remains one of the few who can string qualifying laps from a different dimension, and when Ferrari gives him a Sunday platform, the race craft is there too. What’s missing is repetition — the kind McLaren engineered so ruthlessly in 2025; the kind Red Bull turned into a habit for nearly the entire previous cycle.
Part of the intrigue, of course, is that Leclerc now shares a garage with Lewis Hamilton. That’s its own headline every weekend. Patrese doesn’t hesitate there either: if Ferrari produces a car even close to the benchmark, Hamilton will be in the title conversation — and then some. He still talks about Abu Dhabi 2021 with a wince, believing Hamilton should already be the record-breaking eight-time champion. The message: give Lewis a proper shot and he’ll take the rest of the field right to the red line.
That’s the tension at Ferrari now — and the opportunity. Two alpha-level drivers, one of them the most decorated in the sport’s history, the other still entering his prime. They’ve both been sold a vision of a Scuderia properly rearmed for a fresh rules dawn in 2026. But before that future arrives, the present is noisy. McLaren has the belt, Red Bull is still Red Bull, and Verstappen will not spend another winter in second place quietly.
Patrese’s Leclerc verdict will rile a few partisans — Norris just won the thing, after all — but it’s not a slight on the new champion. It’s a question of who, in the same car, has shown they can live with Verstappen’s tempo when it turns nuclear. Norris took the title on balance and consistency; Leclerc’s case rests on raw peak. Those are two different currencies. The sport needs both.
There’s a wider truth buried in Patrese’s call-out. If Ferrari really wants to end the drought, it isn’t about building a car that’s sometimes there. It’s about repeating what McLaren mastered in 2025: a package that’s quick on Saturday, tire-kind on Sunday, and operationally sharp every weekend. If you can do that, the names on the roster — Leclerc, Hamilton — will do the rest.
Until then, the debate lives on. Can Norris defend? Will Red Bull reassert? And is Patrese right that the only man who can stare down Verstappen, given equal kit, is the one in red? The coming months will tell us whether Ferrari’s promise becomes a program — and whether Leclerc finally gets the car to turn the maybes into must-be’s.
