MONACO — Ferrari doubled its win tally from all of last season as Charles Leclerc ended his barren two-year run in Formula 1 with a victory from pole position at Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix.
Eight races into the 2024 schedule, the Ferrari and McLaren teams are showing more and more evidence they might be able to challenge Red Bull. For F1 fans as a whole, it offers hope of more competitive racing.
“It’s exciting, and I hope it will be like this for the rest of the season,” Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur said after Sunday’s race. “It will be up and down until the end.”
It wasn’t last season, when Max Verstappen beat his own F1 record with an astounding 19 wins for Red Bull. His teammate Sergio Perez got two victories, and the only driver outside of those two to win a grand prix was Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz Jr.
Leclerc, Sainz and McLaren’s Lando Norris have one win each this year. The other five wins all belong to Red Bull and Verstappen, the three-time reigning series champion whose streak of pole positions ended at eight on Saturday — he tied the late Ayrton Senna’s F1 record a week earlier at the Emilia Romagna GP — when Leclerc took the top spot in Monaco qualifying.