The mythos of Ferrari will sweep you up if you aren't careful, and it's easy to be careless in Monza. The tifosi are out in force. They carry massive flags emblazoned with the prancing horse, and bring flares that douse the stands in red. Oh, you'll see similar scenes at the Dutch Grand Prix, and hear them at the British Grand Prix, but in Formula 1, only the tifosi are fully able to blur the line between nationalism and the rapturous worship of a team and its brand—or a brand and its team, depending on how you'd like to think about it. Meet a driver, and the first instinct is to clutch his hand and kiss it, like a king or a god. At the Italian Grand Prix, everyone is a Ferrari fan. Even if they say they're not, they are Ferrari fans.
Charles Leclerc is the perfect vessel to carry all of it. Not quite homegrown, but tied to the team for any relevant span of his racing career. His debut year for Ferrari immediately cemented him as Ferrari's answer to Max Verstappen; his bright, mercurial brilliance was enough to supersede even Sebastian "Ferrari's biggest fan" Vettel, who had spent the two previous years fighting Lewis Hamilton honestly for a championship. Carlos Sainz Jr. is also racing for the team, but, biology aside, he doesn't bleed red the way Leclerc does. It was Leclerc who, in 2019, gave Ferrari its first home win in nearly a decade. And with Lewis Hamilton joining the team next year, 2024 is perhaps the last year where he and his little wiener dog will form the undisputed core of the team.
For all of the aesthetic and historic appeal, Ferrari hasn't won a championship since 2007, and it has achieved that milestone through frequent, public, and embarrassing dysfunction. The most recent year in which Ferrari looked like a World Championship contender from the get-go, 2022, was dogged by engine blow-ups, egregious strategy miscalls, and the other sharp edge of Leclerc's driving: Sometimes, he'll just lose the car. Since then, Ferrari has undergone an extreme overhaul including swapping out Leclerc's race engineer, the mononymous and now infamous Xavi exchanged for Bryan Bozzi, but any on-track result has been overshadowed by McLaren's sudden ascension to the fastest car on the grid.
Monza looked like much of the same, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri securing a front row lockout in qualifying, while George Russell started third. Leclerc was down in fourth, and Fanboost no longer exists in Formula E, much less F1; unless Ferrari engineers find a way to turn tifosi cheers into horsepower, home track advantage can't overcome a pace differential. That takes strategy and luck—a big ask, for Ferrari.
On paper, Ferrari came out relatively even in the initial stint of the race. Despite his stellar qualifying performances, Norris has had a woeful pole-to-first-lap-lead conversion rate, and his race start issues dogged him again in Monza. He managed to hold the lead off the line, but was overtaken by a well-executed dive down the inside from Piastri. When it rains, it pours: Leclerc was able to pounce past Norris going into the next turn. This track position lead was shortly undone by McLaren making the first call into the pits and pulling off a successful undercut.
After the first pit stops, Piastri and Norris were running first and second. Unfortunately for McLaren, their rise in pace has been coupled with Ferrari-lite strategy calling. With just 15 laps to go, and Piastri five seconds ahead of the rest of the field, McLaren called Piastri in for a second pit stop. It was an egregious decision at face value that earned a disbelieving Lewis Hamilton comment mid-race and a strategy rundown post-race. "Looking at the race trace, I think McLaren had the pace, they just pushed too hard. They were doing much too fast laps early on, and killed their tires," Hamilton said. "I guess they literally had planned for a two-stop, that's why they were pushing so hard. If they just backed off and gone longer, they could've for sure made a one-stop. I was getting the information of what times they were doing, and there's no way your tires are going to last at that pace."
Ferrari took the opportunity offered to them on a platter. They made the call for the one-stop, and from then it was a matter of tire management. Where Sainz lost ground to the McLarens, Leclerc managed to lap just two tenths under his fastest pace on old hard tires. In the end, the root of the victory wasn't quite as shiny as the overtake Leclerc managed in lap one, and the victory itself wasn't quite as new and romantic as his first, but Leclerc—well out of championship contention—can go the rest of the season without another race win and still feel satisfied. This year, at least, he won the races that mattered, summed up nicely by Alex Jacques's declaration on broadcast: "The man from Monaco is the man for Monza."
Ferrari's call for the one-stopper came from the same intuition that drove George Russell's strategy call in Spa—even the best-case scenario of a two-stopper provides no shot of a race win, so you may as well as take the only choice that will—though it doesn't match in sheer gutsiness. In this case, it was the de facto obvious thing to do, called by the commentators as soon as the McLarens pitted. But Ferrari has spent years doing the wrong thing even in the face of de facto obvious things to do. It finally did the right thing at the right time, and, prancing horse willing, will have the right driver to pull it off until he decides to retire.
Leclerc had all the right moves on the podium, too. He stood for the anthems and the champagne spray in the, well, certainly unique black race suits that Ferrari prepared for the weekend, but when it came to take photos and wave to the tifosi crowded under the podium, he bared the familiar red of his undershirt. Every romantic moment in F1 is a trick of the light: the champagne, the sound of engines, the idea that any of this matters or is even very pleasant. The greatest coup any driver or team can pull off is to make you believe it anyway, if just for one moment. For that purpose, Ferrari could have instituted Bryce Bozzi purely on his ability to wield poetic declarations after victory. "Ma come ci fai sognare," he cried to Leclerc, "come ci fai sognare!" But how you make us dream, how you make us dream.
