Charles Leclerc

Every great karting rivalry needs two drivers who refuse to lift. Between 2012 and 2013, European karting got exactly that: Charles Leclerc versus Max Verstappen, contact and disqualifications included. But Leclerc's kart story starts long before that feud, on a little circuit at Brignoles run by the father of Jules Bianchi.

The karting years

Leclerc first raced at five and spent his early years flattening the French regional scene, winning the PACA championship in the Mini class in 2005 — fifteen wins from eighteen races — and defending it in 2006. Titles kept coming through Minime and Cadet: the Trophée Claude Secq in 2007, another PACA crown in 2008, then the 2009 French Cadet Championship and Bridgestone Cup, by which point watchmaker Richard Mille had begun backing him.

The international phase was short and dense. In KF3 in 2010 he became the youngest winner of the Monaco Kart Cup and finished runner-up to Pierre Gasly in the French championship. In 2011, now scouted by Nicolas Todt's All Road Management, he delivered his signature season: victory in the KF3 World Cup at Sarno — a race he later called his best in karting — plus the CIK-FIA Academy Trophy and the Masters at Paris-Bercy. Moving to KF2 with the factory ART Grand Prix squad in 2012, he won the WSK Euro Series and finished runner-up in both the European Championship and the world title fight, the latter lost by a single point. For 2013, aged fifteen, he jumped into KZ — gearbox karting, the discipline that forgives nothing — and ended the season runner-up to Verstappen in the world championship final at Varennes-sur-Allier.

What made them different

Precision under pressure, learned early and tested hard. The Verstappen wars defined his senior kart years: a 2012 clash that got both of them disqualified, and repeated wheel-to-wheel battles through 2013 that Leclerc has credited with building his experience and his character. Racing the most aggressive junior of his generation, in shifter karts, at fifteen, is a finishing school few drivers survive with their reputation enhanced. Leclerc did.

The other thread is the Bianchi family. Jules Bianchi was Leclerc's godfather and even worked as his karting mechanic, and the Brignoles track where it all began belonged to Jules's father. That mentorship gave Leclerc something rarer than raw pace: a professional's approach to preparation years before he needed one. The pace was never in doubt anyway — ask anyone who watched Sarno in 2011.

Legacy

Leclerc's CV is the modern blueprint for a small-nation karter going global: regional titles, French national crowns, a World Cup, an Academy Trophy, then a baptism in KZ against the very best. He proved the Academy Trophy could be a genuine springboard rather than a sideshow, and his 2013 season remains a reference point for how quickly an elite direct-drive karter can adapt to gearbox machinery. He left for single-seaters in 2014 and reached Formula 1 in 2018, becoming a multiple grand prix winner for Ferrari — but karting insiders still talk mostly about the point he lost in 2012, and the fights with Verstappen that forged two of the modern era's fiercest racers.