Charles Leclerc says when Ferrari told him Lewis Hamilton would be joining the team next year, his first thought was: ‘What an opportunity.’

Seven-time champion Hamilton will be Leclerc’s third team-mate in what will be his seventh season at Ferrari, following four-time champion Sebastian Vettel and current partner Carlos Sainz.

“For me,” Leclerc tells BBC Sport in a wide-ranging exclusive interview, “it’s an incredible opportunity. First, to learn from the most successful driver ever. And to prove myself as well against Lewis, who is a benchmark for everybody.”

Inside F1, some viewed Ferrari’s decision to sign Hamilton last winter as a blow for Leclerc.

For years the team had been making it clear Leclerc was the driver they had invested in to lead them to the World Championship. So to some, signing Hamilton seemed to suggest Ferrari might have lost a little confidence in their protege.

Leclerc, 26, says he never thought of it that way.

“Not at all,” he says. “Because Ferrari is Ferrari. And they need the best drivers in their cars. So, for the benefit of Ferrari, it is completely understandable.

“For me, I don’t see any negative in that, because it’s Lewis Hamilton.”

Does Leclerc think he can beat Hamilton?

“Well,” he says. “I need to be convinced that I am the fastest driver when I put the helmet on, but I am really looking forward to it, and it will be super-interesting for me.

“I have always said you learn from every single team-mate you have over your career. When I look at the way he drives – because we always look at each other and data – you don’t really see any weaknesses. And that’s where Lewis is incredible. He’s only got strengths.

“So I’m really looking forward to seeing how he works with his engineers, the feedback, and all of these kings of things, to learn and become better.”

The match-up between Hamilton, 39, and Leclerc is especially interesting because it pits the most successful driver in F1 history against the one many in the sport think might currently be the fastest of all over one lap.

Leclerc has compiled a series of spectacular pole positions across his career, and with 24 is already 12th in the all-time list – equal with three-time champions Niki Lauda and Nelson Piquet.

Putting the uncompetitive 2021 Ferrari on pole in both Monaco and Baku, for example, was an outstanding achievement – as was his stunning pole lap in Singapore in 2019.

Does Leclerc agree he is the fastest driver in F1?

“It’s a good question,” he says. “As a driver, you always have the confidence you are the fastest and I do have that whenever I go for a qualifying lap.

“It’s all about that mindset and putting that lap together in qualifying when it is needed and the pressure is super-high. This is an exercise I have always loved.”

Why does he think he is so quick over one lap?

“I’ve always said I drive a lot with the intuition,” he says. “I work a lot, of course. But that is where one of my strengths is, that I feel things very, very quickly.”

Does he think he takes more risks than some rivals in qualifying?

“I don’t think so on most of the tracks,” Leclerc says. “On street tracks, I would tend to think that maybe sometimes I take a bit more risk than the others but I don’t know.

“You don’t tend to do the fastest lap by being the most on the edge as possible. Sometimes, being a tiny bit under the limit is faster than being on the limit, because on the limit you are opening the balance, you get massive snaps and you lose a lot [of time].

“So it’s a balance between knowing which corners you can push flat out and extract the maximum out of the car, and some corners where you actually have to take it at 95% and this is a faster way. And that’s where it’s more probably the intuition that comes out on top.”

Leclerc says the offset between his pole tally and his six victories is largely because “we have had very often in the past a car that was very strong in qualifying but then over a race distance we were destroying the tyres” – something Ferrari are “working on and actually changing the tendency now but we’ve lost a little bit the pace in qualifying”.

He doesn’t mention the multiple others he lost to Ferrari’s strategy and operational blunders and reliability fallings through the era of previous team boss Mattia Binotto.

When Hamilton made his decision to move to Ferrari, it looked an inspired one, because the Italian team had ended 2023 strongly and appeared in better shape than Mercedes.

Despite Max Verstappen’s domination with Red Bull, Ferrari took six poles in the final 11 races of last season, and Leclerc three of the last five.

Ferrari narrowly missed out on catching Mercedes for second place in the 2023 constructors’ championship, and they started this season as the clear second-best team to Red Bull.

This strong period culminated with victory for Leclerc in Monaco, on the streets where he grew up and first dreamed of becoming an F1 driver. He had finally delivered a win he had threatened in both 2021 and 2022, only for circumstances to intervene.

“A combination of things made this win so special,” Leclerc says. “It means a lot to me to be racing at home, and home being Monaco – one of the most challenging tracks on the calendar

“Second, everything that happened in the past that denied us the win even when we were in the best possible place to do that. It was always very difficult to accept. As a driver, you never know when the next opportunity will arrive again on such a track, so it was amazing this year to finally make it.”

Since Monaco, Leclerc and Ferrari have been through a difficult phase, just as Mercedes seem finally to have got a handle on their car.

An upgrade introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix last month created problems, and for the last race at Silverstone the team took it off, and reverted the car to a previous specification.

It has rather spoiled what had until then been obvious, consistent progress by Ferrari under team principal Frederic Vasseur, who took over at the start of 2023. But Leclerc believes the team are still on the right track under Vasseur.

“Fred has two very big strengths which are very important in F1 and especially in a team like Ferrari, where the passion is so high that in very good moments there are lots of emotions but there are also very big emotions whenever we are going through a tough time,” says Leclerc.

“In F1, you need to be as flat emotionally as possible and Fred is always a little bit the balance.

“Whenever we have very difficult moments, he helps the team to be back at a reasonable level and not be too disappointed. And exactly the same when we win, to not be too high and bring us back down and tell everybody we’ve got to work because this is only one race.”

Vasseur’s other quality, Leclerc says, is “to put every single person in the condition for them to work at their best. What has helped us in the last year and a half is that we have had a very clear vision of what issues we want to address in order to be quicker.”

Leclerc has known his team boss for many years. They enjoyed success in the junior categories, and worked together at Sauber when Leclerc made his F1 debut in 2018. As such, Vasseur is also a useful confidant on a personal level.

Leclerc is renowned for his self-criticism, and Vasseur is someone he can bounce off.

“It’s very important to be self-critical in F1 because you find yourself in a situation, in a position that people tend to agree with you more often than not,” Leclerc says.

“That might feel nice in the first few moments, but I don’t think it is a good thing for a driver, just because you don’t have that honesty around you any more.

“That’s why I have always been very honest with myself, and if anything even harsher with myself than with anybody else. Just to balance it out a little bit with the situation I find myself in.

“It has worked out for me. In the past, it has always been one of my characteristics to be hard on myself. I think it is a bit my father who helped me to understand that it was very important for me to be honest with myself. And I have always kept that.

“When I was younger, it wasn’t beneficial because I was too hard on myself and I would actually put myself down. Then I have learned with time that it is very important to be honest, but to still have confidence in yourself and it is the balance of the two that works well for me.

“But now there is also Fred, and we have a very good relationship and he knows me since a long time before F1, so he is definitely not afraid of telling me when I do something wrong or when he thinks that I am saying or doing something wrong. This is a very important person to have by my side.”

Despite Ferrari’s recent hiccup in form, Leclerc still believes the team can return to the top this season.

“In the last few races, we are not exactly where we want to be in terms of performance and that is my main priority – to come back to a performance where we are in the fight for poles and wins,” he says.

“I would expect us to be in the fight with McLaren and Red Bull as soon as we maximise the potential of our upgrades on the car.”

The drivers’ championship looks out of reach, realistically – at the halfway point, Leclerc is in third place, 105 points behind Verstappen. As for the constructors’ title, Ferrari are 71 points behind with only one Red Bull scoring big points because of the dip in form in recent races by Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Perez.

What does Leclerc think he and Ferrari can achieve over the remaining 12 races?

“I still believe the highest targets are possible, which means the championship,” he says.

Really?

“Yes, I do.”

Is that just racing-driver optimism?

“I don’t know,” he says, “but I think it’s important for me to keep that optimism and to keep that motivation very high.

“At the end, we are speaking about 0.2secs. Which, whenever we put everything together, it’s not that crazy. We’ve got to focus on every single detail and the season is still long and so I still believe in that.”