Zak Brown defends Charles Leclerc and explains why Ferrari’s poles are not turning into victories. Zak Brown defends Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc, praising his qualifying talent .

The last race before the summer break, held in Hungary, was a painful one for Charles Leclerc. After securing pole position on Saturday with an excellent qualifying performance, he was left bitterly disappointed on Sunday when he could only finish fourth at the checkered flag. For more than two-thirds of the race he had been in the fight for victory, but once again the Ferrari driver saw his pole position fail to translate into a race win. Unfortunately, this has become something of a recurring theme for him in recent years.

In fact, throughout his Formula 1 career Charles Leclerc has started from pole position on 27 occasions, but he has only managed to convert eight of those into victories. Even more telling, out of those eight race wins, only five came from pole. This means that the Monegasque driver has seen 22 pole positions slip away without victory. Critics often highlight this statistic as evidence against him, claiming that although he is an exceptional qualifier, he struggles to carry the same dominance into the full length of a Grand Prix. For detractors, this is the main weakness of the Ferrari driver born in 1997.

The defense of Zak Brown
Zak Brown, the American CEO of McLaren, which is currently enjoying a dominant season in Formula 1, sees things very differently. Speaking to the motorsport website Racer.com, Brown came to Leclerc’s defense, using him as an example in a broader discussion about how the media sometimes shapes unfair narratives around drivers — in particular, how similar criticism had once surrounded his own driver Lando Norris.

“There was a period when, according to general opinion, Lando was not capable of winning starting from pole position. And yet now he has won four of the last five races [in which he started] from pole,” said Zak Brown.

Turning to Charles Leclerc, Zak Brown explained that the situation is comparable: “There is another statistic about Charles, of whom I am a big fan, which says that he has not won many races starting from pole. I do not believe this is a flaw of his,” continued the McLaren boss.

A question of narrative
Brown went further in explaining his reasoning: “I think this is a reflection of how fantastic Charles is on a single lap, and that he probably manages to put a car at the front that does not actually have the best race pace. So it is not my intention to diminish him in any way. I think Charles has enormous talent. But the point is that sometimes people want to create a certain type of narrative and then, when that narrative disappears, there is never any kind of public retraction of what was said before.”

In Zak Brown’s view, Charles Leclerc deserves recognition not only for his qualifying performances but also for the way he consistently extracts the maximum potential from machinery that is often not capable of sustaining victory over a full race distance. For him, the statistics that critics use against Leclerc are instead proof of just how much the Ferrari driver pushes beyond the limits of his car, particularly in qualifying conditions where he has often outperformed expectations.