Arthur Leclerc and the Karting Years He Had to Give Up

Our club has a family with two racing sons and one trailer. The older one gets the seat time, because he is closer to a result that might lead somewhere, and everybody involved made that decision together at a kitchen table. The younger one crews for him and waits.

That arrangement is more common in this sport than anybody admits, and it usually gets described afterward as talent. The quick one made it, the other one did not, and the story ends there.

Arthur Leclerc is the version of that story where somebody wrote down the numbers. A Monegasque racing driver who spent years out of a kart because his family chose to fund his brother, and who is now a Ferrari development driver with a works GT program. Knowing which part of that came from talent and which from arithmetic is the whole point of reading about him.

The years that are missing from the record

Monte Carlo, October 2000, three years behind his brother Charles. A karting championship in 2014. And then, for some years, nothing at all.

The family decided to prioritize the older brother’s career. That sentence reads quietly and was not quiet to live through. Karting at a serious level costs tens of thousands a year, and two sons at that level was not a budget the household had.

Charles went on to win the Formula 2 title in his rookie season and reach Ferrari. Arthur came back to racing in 2018, at seventeen, in French Formula 4. Drivers on a normal path are two steps further up by then.

What he did once he was racing again

The table above has the seasons, and they contradict the usual assumption about younger brothers.

In 2020 he finished runner-up in Formula Regional European Championship with Prema, and he won more races than the champion did. Six of them. His wet-weather drives were the ones people wrote about.

Two seasons of Formula 3 followed, ending sixth in 2022 with a win, and a Formula Regional Asia title in the same period. Then Formula 2 with DAMS in 2023, a podium in Melbourne, points on ten occasions, and a season that published sources place at either fourteenth or fifteenth overall.

That is not the record of a driver who was carried. It is the record of a driver who arrived late and spent four years making up ground.

Where the ladder ran out

It ran out where it runs out for most people, at the gap between Formula 2 and a Formula 1 seat.

There were twenty seats and a great many more drivers with a credible claim to one. Arthur left the Ferrari Driver Academy, and the thing people assume at that moment is that somebody finally measured him and found him wanting.

What actually happened is more ordinary. A Formula 2 season that ends outside the top ten produces no argument for promotion, and no amount of surname fixes that.

What the job looks like now

Two things, and both are the kind of work that gets called a consolation prize by people who have never done it.

He is a development driver for Ferrari, meaning simulator work and correlation testing that feeds into the car his brother races. And he drives a Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo for AF Corse in GT World Challenge Europe, with a full program across both the Endurance Cup and the Sprint Cup.

The results are in the table above. A manufacturer pays him to win races. Almost everybody who starts karting is hoping to become exactly that.

The comparison nobody can avoid

Charles has a Ferrari contract through 2028 and a win at Silverstone this year. The comparison is unavoidable and mostly useless, for a reason that has nothing to do with either of them.

They did not run the same race. One had an uninterrupted career from karting upward. The other had several years taken out of the middle of his, by a decision made for the family rather than by either son, and started again at an age when the ladder has already begun closing.

Anybody reading this who is the younger one in a paddock should know two things. The arithmetic is real. So is what you do afterward. Arthur Leclerc lost years to it and is still being paid to drive a Ferrari. The family in our club trailer will have to decide something similar in about two seasons, and I hope somebody shows them this one.

Questions about Arthur Leclerc

01

Who is Arthur Leclerc?

A Monegasque racing driver born in 2000, the younger brother of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, a former Ferrari Driver Academy member and now a Ferrari development driver racing a 296 GT3 Evo for AF Corse.

02

Why did Arthur Leclerc stop karting?

His family chose to prioritize his older brother’s career. He returned to racing in 2018, in French Formula 4, at seventeen.

03

What does Arthur Leclerc race in 2026?

A Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo for AF Corse in GT World Challenge Europe, with a full program across the Endurance Cup and the Sprint Cup.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.