Every time Ferrari and Charles Leclerc agree to extend their relationship in Formula 1, the news comes against a background of allusions to other suitors Charles has spurned to remain with his true love. "For that, I'm also lucky to be in the position where I've got my manager," he said on F1's Beyond the Grid podcast. "And my manager is here to let me know about what are the other opportunities... So, yes, there were other opportunities. But at the end of the day, we sat down with Ferrari and we made it happen quite quickly."

If Leclerc has a special relationship with Ferrari, the same can be said of his manager, Nicolas Todt: son of Jean Todt, the former rally co-driver who masterminded Peugeot's rally and endurance programmes before leading Ferrari to world domination in the Michael Schumacher era, then shifted into politics as FIA president for over a decade. Todt Jr also managed long-time Ferrari driver Felipe Massa and still superintends the affairs of James Calado, a Le Mans winner with the Scuderia. He has a great many drivers on his books at all stages of the career ladder, and is a consummate player in the paddock. But what Todt Jr enjoys to a greater extent at Ferrari than anywhere else is the ear of influential figures further up the food chain than the team principal – although he is a key ally of Fred Vasseur, having co-founded the ART GP organisation with him over two decades ago. Indeed, it's understood that Todt was instrumental in the removal of former team principal Mattia Binotto and his replacement by Vasseur in January 2023.

Having a manager so plugged into the senior echelons of power enables Leclerc to get what he wants with plausible deniability, such as Binotto's departure at a time when Ferrari's recovery trajectory underwent a major wobble, and the peculiarly communicated removal of Xavier Marcos as Leclerc's race engineer early in the 2024 season. He would not have quite the same influence if he were to shift to another team. Equally, his influence depends not just on his performance but also his market value. If Ferrari has Leclerc locked into a contractual "golden prison", as our Italian colleague Roberto Chinchero puts it, then threatening to go elsewhere is no longer a lever he can pull. Nobody doubts Leclerc's speed or commitment. Arguably he often over-commits, especially if the car isn't good enough. If the Ferrari is only 90% or 95% as good as the frontrunning car, Charles will try to make up the shortfall himself in the form of risk. That's why the Tifosi place him in the same rarefied space in their hearts as Gilles Villeneuve. In recent seasons Leclerc's prime options outside Ferrari have been with Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren, whose leaders have had to weigh up the performance benefits Leclerc would bring against the change in equilibrium it would cause. Nicolas Todt has certainly been busy doing the rounds of those teams over the past couple of years, but there is a tendency in the F1 media to get rather too excited when a driver's manager is spotted in another team's motorhome. Sometimes a casual chat is just a casual chat. Sometimes a deal may actually be in progress, though the likelihood of this happening in plain sight is quite low. Often such encounters are staged in public purely to suit each party's agendas: for the team principal, to show their drivers they have other options on the table; for the manager, to show his client has interest from elsewhere. To manage the internal equilibrium when it announced in January 2024 that Lewis Hamilton would be joining the following season, Ferrari also signed Leclerc to a long-te...