Failing to prance at the top of the Formula 1 world championship, he climbs the charts. For several days, the Monegasque rider of the Scuderia Ferrari Charles Leclerc has been creating a buzz after posting one of his piano compositions on the listening platforms. In just four short days, his track “AUS23 1:1” has been listened to more than 1.5 million times on the Spotify platform, leader in the streaming market according to the latest trends in the sector.

“I’m very surprised by the success, I knew it would make a bit of noise, because an F1 driver releasing a song, that’s unusual. But I didn’t want to do any marketing, I just wanted to share it with those who like me to play the piano”, explained the rider who has been with Ferrari since 2019 in an interview on April 27, on the sidelines of the Grand Prix d Azerbaijan, where he took pole position and finished third on the podium.

Currently sixth in the championship, far behind Verstappen, without being relegated to the depths of the classification, Charles Leclerc claims to have enjoyed this artistic sequence. “I really enjoyed the time spent recording this song, adding instruments. It was cool. To be honest, it didn’t take me long. I had a team around me who helped me with the documents to release this song,” he says.

Why “AUS23 1:1”? The answer is very simple, and was provided by the main interested party as soon as his four-minute and eleven-second long song was published at the end of April. “I created this song around the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix. […] That’s what we call the Australian Grand Prix in my Formula 1 team and I thought it would be a nice connection to the racing world. »

This isn’t the first time a Formula 1 racer has made a foray into music. Thus, Lewis Hamilton made an appearance in a song by singer Christina Aguilera in 2018. As for Charles Leclerc, the 25-year-old explains that he really took to the piano during the Covid-19 pandemic, although the “love for music has always been there”. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the championship was stopped for long weeks in the face of the outbreak of coronavirus cases in Europe and the rest of the world. More than a dozen Grands Prix have even been canceled by the organizers.

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