Just because Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc won the Italian Grand Prix last weekend doesn’t mean he is actually any good at driving regular street cars. On Thursday in his home town of Monaco, the Ferrari F1 ace blasted into the back of what appears to be a Volkswagen van while driving around in his new Purosangue. The video surfaced on TikTok, but was quickly taken down, and thankfully it has resurfaced on Twitter several hours later.
In the video the 26-year-old racer is shown slowly creeping along in traffic going up the tightest hairpin on the F1 calendar. Shortly after the video starts, filmed by a Charles Leclerc fan shouting his name, Chuck stuffs his shiny new Fezza up the rump of the car in front. Despite the crash happening at just above a walking pace, the sound of plastic on plastic crunching can be heard from the upper floor where the video originates. Charles won the Monaco Grand Prix back in May, but apparently doesn’t know how to drive around the city he grew up in without hitting other motorists.
As the short video comes to a close you see Charles and his passenger raise their hands in a mea culpa kind of way, and both cars continue on without either party even getting out to check on the damage. This is a very European mindset, I think, as I’ve seen hundreds of Parisians and Frankfurters with cars parked more by feel than anything else. If your bumpers aren’t a little bit fucked up after living in a tightly condensed European city, did you even drive?
Both cars exit the hairpin and continue on. There are bound to be some broken things on the Ferrari which will costs tens of thousands of dollars to fix. Surely the Scuderia’s lead driver, who has a contract which is rumored to last until at least the 2028 season, could just drop it off in Maranello and pick up a new one whenever he wants. The van driver will probably never think about the interaction ever again.