The quiet lap

Ask Charles Leclerc what goes through his mind when he slips into bed, and the answer may surprise you. Despite being a driver chasing a world championship across continents, it is rarely only racing.

“I’ve raced since I was three and a half years old, and I’ve spent many of my nights thinking about racing and racing only,” he says. “But I’m also very creative. I get obsessed with things very quickly, with new passions. One week it will be padel, the other week it will be music and piano.”

New curiosities arrive almost weekly. Some are tied to the car. Most are not. But when the excitement of his passions, old or new, start to keep him awake, he has trained himself to do the one thing that you wouldn’t think his go-go-go personality permits: sleep. “I value sleeping,” he says. “So I found ways to switch off the brain as much as possible.”

Racing is just the beginning

Leclerc’s list of passions is long, and still growing. After stumbling on a YouTube video during COVID, he picked up padel, having played squash and tennis as a kid. “As soon as we could get out of home, I asked three friends to come and try it with me, and I absolutely loved it.” Then there’s piano and music, which he calls his deepest form of disconnection from the outside world, rotating through songs by Coldplay, The Kooks, and The Strokes. “Probably where I disconnect most is when I actually play the piano.” He’s even composed with French pianist Sofiane Pamart.

Reading, for Leclerc, is another passion, an opportunity to expand his knowledge. His reading appetite is vast: books on AI, on psychology, and, currently, on the whole history of humanity. He also plays chess, a habit he started with his grandfather as a child and never dropped, for “peace of mind, and the fact of always thinking ahead.” He recently tried Pilates, purely to get out of his comfort zone.

It’s a lot of inputs, which is exactly why the off switch matters so much.

The discipline of rest

Leclerc credits learning the discipline of rest early in life, and prioritizing it throughout his career, to his success. At twelve, he attended a performance center in Italy built around two things: physical and mental training. “Physical training, even at twelve, I knew what that meant. But mental training for me was completely new.”

There he was tested on focus and mental performance, and shown the drastic differences in his output when he was tired. That lesson, that high-quality sleep is essential to performance, landed early and never left. “Honestly it’s more about luck than me realizing it,” he says. “I learned about it very early on, and that has been a huge benefit.”

At that training camp, he also learned a tool that he still reaches for on nights when his mind refuses to quiet down: breathing techniques. They don’t erase the thoughts, he says, but they soften them enough to let him fall asleep.

Early prioritization of sleep has freed him from a guilt that a lot of high performers carry. While others boast about burning the midnight oil and rising with the sun, Leclerc has been open about sleeping ten, sometimes eleven hours, guilt-free. “I don’t feel guilty at all. I really enjoy sleeping.” His true sweet spot, he reckons, is closer to eight hours, but a demanding schedule that takes him around the world and jet lag compound his sleep debt. When he’s home, he tries to pay it off with consistent, high-quality sleep.

Seven years in the making

His view on rest, performance, and recovery is what drew Leclerc toward Eight Sleep, first as a user, then ambassador, then investor. The reason is practical. “I travel all the time, and every time I’m at home, it’s for very few nights. Those few nights are very important for me to be back at 100%.” The Pod also solved something specific in his own bedroom. He and his wife Alexandra never agreed on temperature: He runs warm and would end up on top of the covers; she runs cold and would stay underneath. Being able to set each side separately and sleep side-by-side, he says, “is probably the best feature in the world.”

The partnership itself was kismet. Leclerc tried the Pod, loved it, and reached out to co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti, an Italian and a lifelong motorsport fan, to propose doing something together. They agreed to meet in Miami. It was there that Franceschetti told him the rest of the story: Eight Sleep had quietly approached Leclerc’s manager seven years earlier, when the company was much smaller, and nothing had come of it. Leclerc had never known. “Seven years later, I was the one to contact Matteo,” he says. “It’s a cool story. At the end, it was meant to be that way.”

What convinced him to put his name and his money behind the brand was in part the product he and his wife loved, but it was also the people. Visiting Eight Sleep’s design team in San Francisco, what struck him was how a company that size could remain nimble. “How reactive the team is, considering how big the company already is, has always been very impressive.”