Charles Leclerc’s disastrous Italian Grand Prix has prompted Giorgio Terruzzi to look beyond the Ferrari driver’s heavy Monza crash and question whether the demands surrounding modern Formula 1 weekends are becoming excessive. After an aggressive opening-lap battle with Lewis Hamilton and a race-ending accident at Parabolica, the Italian journalist argued that Leclerc’s mistakes reflected a level of frustration that may have been building before the race even began.
The Ferrari driver’s afternoon unravelled almost immediately. First came the confrontation with Hamilton at the opening chicane, followed by a difficult sequence in which Leclerc lost positions before crashing heavily while under pressure from Oscar Piastri. The accident ended a weekend in which Leclerc had spent considerable time in the spotlight away from the car as well as on track.
Giorgio Terruzzi criticises Charles Leclerc’s Monza start against Lewis Hamilton
Speaking on his Terruzzi Racconta podcast, Giorgio Terruzzi reviewed both Leclerc’s troubled race and Kimi Antonelli’s impressive victory. His analysis began with the Ferrari battle on the opening lap, where he was particularly critical of how Charles Leclerc handled the presence of team-mate Lewis Hamilton.
Terruzzi described Leclerc’s move as unreasonable because, in his view, drivers would normally exercise greater caution when racing a team-mate side by side on the first lap. Instead, he felt Leclerc treated Hamilton exactly as he would any other rival and forced the seven-time world champion off at the first chicane.
The incident became one of the defining moments of Ferrari’s opening lap and added to the debate around how the team managed its two drivers at Monza. Leclerc himself later acknowledged that the fight with Lewis Hamilton had gone too far, underlining how quickly the Scuderia’s race became complicated.
Terruzzi sees frustration behind Charles Leclerc’s Monza crash
Terruzzi then turned to the sequence that led to Leclerc’s retirement. He argued that both the crash and the mistakes preceding it revealed overwhelming frustration from the Monegasque, who had been overtaken twice over the space of roughly 30 metres.
With Oscar Piastri putting him under pressure, Leclerc found himself away from the normal line through a corner that effectively offers a single racing line. Terruzzi noted that the Ferrari driver accelerated early in an attempt to carry more speed onto the straight, only for the manoeuvre to end in a severe impact with the barriers.
The available telemetry analysis of Leclerc’s Monza accident also showed how his approach differed while battling Piastri. Terruzzi regarded the entire sequence as the conclusion to an extremely discouraging Sunday for the Ferrari driver.
The accident at Parabolica also carried an uncomfortable historical echo, coming six years after another incident involving Leclerc at the same Monza corner. In 2026, however, Terruzzi believes the more interesting question concerns what may have contributed to the state of mind that preceded the mistake.
Could Formula 1’s Monza spectacle have added to Leclerc’s pressure?
Terruzzi’s broader argument focused on the amount of promotional activity and public attention surrounding a modern Grand Prix. He suggested that young drivers are being overwhelmed by responsibilities away from the cockpit and maintained that their priority should remain the driving itself.
In Leclerc’s case, Terruzzi pointed to a period of around ten days filled with promotional commitments and public appearances before and around the Italian Grand Prix. He considered that workload excessive and argued that the relentless activity surrounding the event may have contributed to the Ferrari driver’s frustration.
He used Kimi Antonelli’s media commitments as another example, suggesting that the Italian would have faced an enormous number of interviews while repeatedly having to discuss hopes of producing a comeback and entertaining the home crowd despite starting from the back. Antonelli ultimately delivered the standout result of the weekend, with his victory forming another major theme of the Italian Grand Prix race analysis.
Terruzzi’s argument was not that promotional activity alone determined the outcome on track. Rather, he questioned whether the wider Formula 1 spectacle can impose too many demands on drivers at a time when their concentration should be centred on racing.
Giorgio Terruzzi makes Sebastian Vettel comparison over Leclerc
The most striking part of Terruzzi’s assessment concerned Leclerc’s broader trajectory. The journalist suggested that the Ferrari driver appears to have lost some of the instinctive quality that helped establish him at the front of Formula 1.
Terruzzi linked that impression to the opportunities Leclerc has missed in his pursuit of a world championship, wondering whether something has gradually slipped away after repeated disappointments. His comparison was with former Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel, whom Terruzzi believes similarly lost part of his competitive edge during a difficult phase of his career.
It is a significant assessment of a driver whose position and responsibilities within Maranello have already attracted renewed scrutiny following the tension surrounding Ferrari’s Monza weekend. Terruzzi’s comments ultimately combine two different criticisms: Leclerc’s own decisions during the race and the increasingly demanding environment surrounding Formula 1 drivers away from the cockpit.
For Leclerc, Monza therefore represented far more than a single costly accident. The opening-lap clash with Hamilton, the positions lost shortly afterwards and the eventual crash under pressure from Piastri produced a particularly difficult afternoon, while Terruzzi believes the events surrounding the Grand Prix may also deserve attention when assessing how the weekend unravelled.
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