Next career move for Charles Leclerc’s ex-F1 race engineer revealed

Charles Leclerc’s former F1 race engineer has been appointed by Cadillac as technical director of their LMDh sportscar project.

Xavier Marcos worked as Leclerc’s race engineer at the Ferrari F1 team between 2019 and mid-2024.

The Spaniard initially joined Ferrari in 2018 in a factory-based engineering role, before teaming up with Leclerc when he arrived at the team from Sauber.

Marcos was replaced last May ahead of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, with Bryan Bozzi taking up the position as Leclerc’s new race engineer.

Prior to joining Ferrari, Marcos was a chief race engineer in NASCAR, but had previous F1 stints for HRT and later Williams.

Autosport report he will now make the switch to sportscar racing for 2025, taking on the newly-created role of technical director at Cadillac Racing for their LMDh programme.

Leclerc and ‘Xavi’ had some memorable radio exchanges during their five-year spell working together at Ferrari, including the famous “we are checking” message.

Speaking about his change of race engineer last May, Leclerc revealed the decision was a team choice.

“The decision was made between the team and Xavi. They’ve had other plans in mind, I guess, and it was communicated to me right after Miami,” he explained.

“But having said that, Bryan, who will take the role of Xavi from now onwards, is a person I have been working with since I arrived in Ferrari. He’s always been my performance engineer, so he knows exactly how everything works. So, it’s not like I’m starting from zero and it’s going to be a complete re-adaptation.

“It’s been super smooth until now, and I’m sure it will continue that way and we’ll be at our 100% already from this weekend. That’s all I can say.”