the madszine

The Monaco Curse. I turned those words over in my mind as I fiddled with a bracelet I’d made two weeks before. I was sitting in my car in a hospital car park with my upper lip swollen to twice its normal size and my phone propped up on the dashboard just large enough to see the pre-race interviews taking place. How my face ended up like that is irrelevant to this story, except to make the point that I squeaked to my friend when the allergic reaction started at quarter to 14:00, ‘It’s the Monaco Grand Prix – I’m going to miss the Grand Prix!’ Which is why I was sat outside the hospital – trying to figure out if the reaction was bad enough that I’d have to go in before the Grand Prix had finished. The Monaco Curse. I twisted the orange bracelet once more – NO WINS (orange heart) NO MORE, a celebratory reminder of Lando Norris’ first Formula 1 win in Miami. What a weekend that had been, I had always been a huge McLaren fan – a huge Lando fan. Still, there was one driver I was a bigger fan of than even McLaren, one team that I watched through my fingers as they seemed to make self-destructive decision after self-destructive decision. The Monaco Curse. A driver and a team that caused me so much frustration and anxiety to watch that sometimes I considered just becoming a full-time McLaren fan and being done with it: Charles Leclerc, Prince of Ferrari.

I didn’t lack faith in Leclerc. In fact, from the moment I saw him put down a 1.10.270 during qualifying to claim a very solid pole position, I had a feeling in my gut that he was going to win. It’s hard to overtake in Monaco – unless you’re Stefan Bellof – especially in 2024. If you’re on pole, you’re in the hot seat for victory.
‘The Monaco Curse?’ I thought as I scrolled through the seemingly unending compilations of previous Leclerc mishaps in Monaco the week before the race, ‘that’s dumb.’ I have never been superstitious. There was only one problem: once on pole a victory in Monaco seems straightforward – ‘just stay on the road and don’t hit the wall’ I shrugged ‘no one can overtake anyway’ – but Leclerc had been on pole in Monaco twice before in his career and he had won the Monaco Grand Prix zero times. That made his pole-to-victory conversion percentage a whopping 0%. 

​’It’s fine,’ I reminded myself. ‘He’s on pole, all he’s got to do is drive the car round in a circle, he’s got this.’ Still, I sat with my foot nervously tapping as 2pm rolled around and reassuringly familiar words were uttered: ‘it’s lights out, and away we go!’ 

‘Come on Charles,’ I muttered into my hands clasped so tight that the knuckles bled all of their colour, ‘drive.’ He did drive, and that’s when literally everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

Lap 1 of the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix was, without a doubt, the most hysterically chaotic piece of turmoil daring to call itself Formula 1 that I have ever seen. First to go (almost on the first corner) was Carlos Sainz with engine failure sending the other half of the Ferrari team spiralling out of the race to a smoky stop. Then came the carnage that was Kevin Magnussen deciding his HAAS was several feet smaller than it actually was and getting caught up in Sergio Perez’s Redbull – taking out his HAAS teammate Nico Hulkenberg in the process. The result was a HAAS-Redbull sandwich with a side of broken chassis and a red flag – not to mention a bit of Alpine on Alpine scrapping. The race was delayed for over half an hour. The one good thing about the whole fiasco is that my lip had decided it was going to start deswelling. 

Once the race had restarted it was a reasonably unstressful affair. I sat there in the hospital carpark muttering ‘come on,’ ‘come on,’ ‘come on,’ as Leclerc completed lap after lap holding off Oscar Piastri (who put in an excellent performance). Leclerc came to the end of the 78 laps holding a strong 7 second lead over Piastri, welcomed by a standing ovation in the grandstands, to win the Monaco Grand Prix just as he’d looked like he would do since qualifying on Saturday and I breathed a sigh of relief. The celebration from the supporters, from the Ferrari team, from Charles himself, didn’t leave a shred of doubt about how much this victory meant to every person involved. Even David Croft’s slightly whacky commentary got to me and as he excitedly shouted that ‘the son of a hairdresser is a cut above the rest’ (good pun thanks Crofty) I shed a tear. 

I fiddled with the bracelet beneath Lando’s that I had made for the day – a pre-emptive gesture for sure – but one I had always had full faith I would need: ‘IL PREDESTINATO,’ the predestined. As I ate my lunch I celebrated two things. Charles Leclerc was the winner of the Monaco Grand Prix, he had finally achieved his childhood dream, and broken the Monaco Curse forever. And I was not going to die in a carpark in Fife.

featured