Riccardo Ceccarelli on working with Charles Leclerc in his junior career and helping him with his mental training. La Gazzetta dello Sport spoke with Riccardo Ceccarelli.

Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport spoke with Riccardo Ceccarelli, the man who worked with Charles Leclerc as a boy and who helped him become the driver that he is today. Riccardo Ceccarelli (Formula Medicine) worked with Charles Leclerc in his junior career and helped him with his mental training.

A mental coach? “I don’t need it,” Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton say in unison. But there are those who have made progress in their career with the help of mental training. This is the case of Charles Leclerc, the young Phenomenon of Ferrari, which has grown since the first motorsports seasons under the guidance of a team of doctors. “It’s the head that does it all. I analyze everything I do to see if I can improve, ” explained the Monegasque.

The evaluation tests revolved around five parameters: reaction times, concentration, visual performance, memory and visual-coordinating capacity.

Getting the most out of a single test was very difficult, succeeding in the five tests in sequence (25 points) almost impossible.
Ceccarelli: “Charles Leclerc obtained a score of 24. Of about a 1000 drivers that we have examined over the years, only two or three have succeeded.”

“Leclerc’s only limitation was character. The tendency to get angry and lose focus. An aspect on which the twenty-two-year-old Ferrari man has worked a lot, but who still betrays him on some occasions: a striking example is the radio messages in Singapore and Sochi, when Charles found himself behind Vettel because of the strategies and expressed all his disappointment with the engineers. “We noticed it too: in every test he faced, he wanted to win. And when he couldn’t, he got angry. […]. Anger is a sign of energy and motivation, but it is counterproductive if it is not controlled by the brain – explains Ceccarelli – “The perfect driver is a seemingly calm person, with the killer instinct. Charles had to become calmer. And he trained a lot to improve. The key is self-analysis, the ability to understand and admit one’s mistakes, to overcome them. […] ». Just look at how Charles Leclerc’s attitude changes as soon as he gets off the car.