IT’S BEEN A LONG 19 years since Scuderia Ferrari last took home the World Drivers’ Championship title with Kimi Räikkönen, and 18 years since the team won the World Constructors’ Championship in 2008. Yet still, Ferrari’s Tifosi live with hope in their Corsa Rosso beating hearts. This is especially true in Australia, where we have one of the most passionate Ferrari fan bases outside of the Italian Grand Prix races – a race that Ferrari Driver Charles Leclerc counts as one of his favourites.

Ferrari has 11 wins to its name at the Australian Grand Prix, the most recent in 2024, where Carlos Sainz and Leclerc took home first and second place to the loud uproar of the crowd. While the 2025 season may have been one to forget for Ferrari, with neither driver taking home a win, this year the team are putting that all in the past, hoping to see history repeat itself when Lewis Hamilton and Leclerc take the checkered flag this March. Because, if pre-season testing is anything to go by, it’s looking very, very good. With a new set of highly challenging and innovative regulations introduced  – the most extensive to ever be implemented at once – and three weeks of testing in Barcelona and Bahrain, the performance outcome for Ferrari’s SP-26 car has been outstanding.

In the media pen at Bahrain just last week, Leclerc was seen grinning ear to ear. But it’s off the track, where the Monegasque driver has been finding plenty of joy, because in the last year, he’s been engaged in a fierce pursuit of the personal satisfaction found with his creative passions, of which he has many.

In person, the 28-year-old is expectedly charming, yet he’s also surprisingly chatty, incredibly present and fiercely curious towards anyone he’s talking to – a combination of qualities that might come as a surprise to some for a man in his position as one of the most famous athletes in the world. Though once you learn how much culture, creativity and storytelling drive him in his off-track pursuits, perhaps not so shocking.

As one of the most creative drivers on the F1 grid, Leclerc is actively showing what it means to be a true polymath, and doing so within the parameters of his position as an appealing identity in the sport. “If I’m going to be completely honest, I have no idea where my creativity comes from,” he says. “But it’s something that has been within me forever. I’ve always been someone very creative. I’ve always loved music. I’ve always loved architecture and, in general, great attention to detail. Now, obviously, being in Formula 1 and being around quite a lot of content on social media, etc., I found an interest in the way a campaign looks or in the way a campaign is created,” he enthuses.

“These are the things that I am sensitive to and that I really enjoy working on as well.”

Leclerc is one of many athletes around the world now stepping into a creative director role, drawing on learnings from working in elite sport sponsorships to bridge the gap between that world and cultural storytelling. Last year, he formalised this interest and teamed up with his longtime filmmaker, Antoine Truchet, and brand strategist Nicolas Jayr to launch SIDEQUEST. Part creative agency, part production house, this creative venture aims to work with athletes, brands, and content, and to double down on the taste athletes like Leclerc have cultivated through their professional exposure to luxury branding, storytelling, and content, pairing it with the professionals who can bring ideas to life.

“I’m so incredibly happy that we managed to put together a team of such talented people, like Antoine and Nicholas,” he says of SIDEQUEST. “I’m super happy to be part of it. They are great people that I’ve been working with for many, many years. Basically, Antoine has been my content creator for years, and Nicholas is the creative mind that’s worked together with me…it’s a process that I’ve loved so much.”

“Until now, we were all working a little bit on our side, but we decided, ‘okay, it definitely makes sense to come together and to make sure that we really do something special.’ Not only for me, but also to open it to other athletes and to try and make their vision true.”

Last year, Leclerc was named Global Ambassador for Chivas Regal, an appointment separate from his role at Scuderia Ferrari and one that allowed him to step fully into his creative self, blurring his vision with that of the historic whisky brand. Not just any athlete-fronted campaign, what followed a few months later were the fruits of the SIDEQUEST team’s labour, crystallised into a cinematic campaign for Chivas Regal’s whisky-derived clear spirit, CrystalGold.

The campaign combined the brand’s fresh take on a category-bending spirit with Leclerc’s passion for chess, finer details, and fashion.

“It’s been a project that I’ve really, really enjoyed since the beginning, and something where I can also show my creativity,” Leclerc says of the project, noting that it’s not often an athlete gets to work on a brand they’re fronting from day one. “It was super cool to see it come into reality – from the first sketches to thinking about how we would work on this campaign with the Chivas team, to then finally be on the shoot and actually shooting it. To be there from the very first steps to the very last steps was super interesting.”

Part of the reasoning behind SIDEQUEST, Leclerc tells us, was a yearning for greater authenticity in the brand deals he fronts and undertakes – a pursuit that itself links to his passion for racing achievement. “[Authenticity comes] in the values, more than anything,” he says of the brands he chooses to work with. “We need to share the same values, and within that is innovation. For me, [the idea of ] innovating myself is a bit of a strange word, but it’s more about trying to push the boundaries and trying to be the best version of myself, while staying true and remembering who I really am, while at the same time trying to work on myself to be better.”

It’s this idea of pushing boundaries, forward thinking and linking heritage, values he found in Chivas Regal, that sparked a desire to work with the whisky house.

“I went to the distillery in Scotland at the beginning of 2025, and to see the amount of passion that there is within every single person that works within the Chivas brand was something that really surprised me,” he shared. As a side, Chivas Regal’s team later reiterated a story of Leclerc’s distillery visit to us, and said they were surprised by how hands-on the driver was, to the point of taking notes at every point during his tour – a rarity not often seen with celebrity visits. “It was really beautiful to see, and it sparked a lot of excitement in me,” Leclerc enthused.    

Unsurprisingly, then, Leclerc says this specific partnership is one he’s enjoyed getting his teeth into, namely because of the alignment it has with his world on-track and off, driven by the idea that innovation should enhance tradition. This is especially resonant when we consider all the changes that F1 is currently going through for the sake of relevance and future-proofing; a tradition that has pushed the sport to the edge of mobility, technology and competition. “As a driver, you never want to forget who you are, and that’s very important to me,” he says of this tradition via innovation concept. 

“At the end of the day, I’m just a normal person. But with all this craziness around you, sometimes you can lose touch with the ground, but that’s never been my case. You have to remember where you come from, but at the same time, to always look forward and to be able to make sure you are ahead of the curve and trying to surprise your opponents. You always need to think ahead of the game and try to be as ready as possible for every scenario, as well as try to anticipate what the others might come up with.”

You could say that this is exactly what Chivas Regal aimed to do when it launched Crystalgold – a spirit derived from whisky, which has all the markings of a clear spirit, a new flavour and the potential to topple the trendy crown of tequila and mescal. Especially when it comes to innovating cocktail flavours – something we can expect to see show up in Ferrari’s high-end hospitality spaces at the Australian Grand Prix, as Chivas Regal is also a Scuderia Ferrari partner.  

“I will say it’s kind of the same exercise at the end of the day,” Leclerc says, after we ask him if there’s a link between the way he collaborates within the Scuderia Ferrari team and the way he is now approaching his brand collaborations, which is a refreshing take on how athletes might treat their brand deals. “For a partnership to be successful, you need to be working as a team. And that’s something that I always try to embrace whenever I can. Because that is super important to be part of one team and to all have the same scope and all working towards the same direction and goals.”

The 2026 Formula 1 Qatar Airways Australian Grand Prix will take place in Melbourne, March 5-8.

Drink responsibly. Get the Facts: drinkwise.org.au

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