Charles Leclerc Is Bringing Racing Strategy To Board Games And Menswear 

Ahead of the Monza Grand Prix, Man About Town checks in with the Scuderia Ferrari driver as he unveils his new board game SE!ZE, made in collaboration with Chivas Regal. 

Charles Leclerc charging out of the Parabolica and into the home straight of Monza’s “Temple Of Speed” race track (formerly known as the Autodromo Nazionale Monza) at the Italian Grand Prix calls for a great deal of mental resilience, training, and boat loads of nerve – the kind of thing that makes one comfortable hauling it into corners at over 100 miles per hour. This might make a comparison to chess or other board games hard to fathom. One requires a finely-tuned crew of elite strategists and engineers working at pace while a driver is wedged into a highly-engineered, spaceship-like cockpit. The other can be played from the comfort of home, with a glass of whisky on the go. 

But for Leclerc, who was the first Monegasque driver to win the Monaco Grand Prix in 93 years in 2024, that comparison isn’t too hard to make. In fact, he’s bridging the two worlds with the launch of his new boardgame SE!ZE, developed as part of his ongoing partnership with Chivas Regal with the help of games designer James Wallis. The name means 16 in French (which is Leclerc’s F1 racing number). It is played on an 8x8 checkerboard, each player has 16 pieces, six guards and two captains. And the aim is to seize the four marked spaces on a board or to reduce your opponent to two pieces or trapping them, much like in tafl (an ancient board game with roots in Scandinavia). 

“To think about a strategy game requires quite a bit of work, and that is the same with racing. Where work is always the secret behind, that you don’t get to see too much. But there is always a lot of brain power behind making the best chess game, the best SE!ZE game, or anything you try to do at your best,” says Leclerc just a few days out from Monza from an upstairs room of Villa Borromeo, a neo-Baroque villa nestled away a short drive from Milan. “But it has been a very cool experience. It is obviously very new for me. There’s also a place for creativity, which I think in my sport is also something that is very much present.” The driver feels that it is quicker to pick up than chess, but difficult to master, as he found at the game’s unveiling where he went head-to-head with chess master Hikaru Nakamura who beat him in a showdown. 

But preparing for the unpredictable comes with the territory of racing F1. “I think the key is in the preparation and trusting your instinct,” pinpoints Leclerc. “When you prepare yourself for an event, and I’m not talking about today’s event, but just in general, when you do the best you can possibly do to be as ready as possible on that day, just trust your instinct. If you’ve done your homework, then things will come naturally so I just think [listen to your] instinct in those kinds of moments.” 

There’s a lot of things – like weather, car mechanics, and team performance – you can’t control in a Formula 1 race. But you can lock off what you wear. Leclerc, who starred in a Giorgio Armani made-to-measure campaign in 2020, and Ferrari’s in-house luxury label designed by Rocco Ionone in 2025, manoeuvres through race season like a stealthy assassin, favouring high-yield minimalist clothes – the stuff that looks really good but doesn’t distract from the job at hand. It’s curated with the help of his stylist Carlotta Constant, but just like SE!ZE games and racing, finding the right fits has taken a lot of work, and research to achieve this sense of effortlessness.

“It’s a process that has definitely evolved with time and has changed massively. I remember maybe 15 years ago, I was kind of wearing the first thing I’d see in my wardrobe,” says Leclerc. “And then growing up you obviously discover new cultures, new places in the world and that has really opened up my mind in just looking at what people would wear. [I ask] what would make a person feel good about himself? And try to analyse myself [asking] ‘What did I feel good wearing?”

As for the place that has influenced him the most? That’s Japan, where he was enamoured by the country’s stripped-back, wabi-sabi architecture and interior design. But even with access to guru-tier menswear and armed with a uber tapped-in stylist, when it comes to locking in, the simple stuff works best. “Hoodies in general are something I like,” Leclerc finishes. “Going around for races, we get recognised a lot, so to put a hoodie on is a way to hide from the crowd and be in my own bubble, which I enjoy sometimes.”