Jock Clear has worked with the best of Ferrari’s past, present and future: Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.Two of those sit on Formula 1’s Mount Rushmore as the sport’s only two seven-time world champions, while the other is desperate to be the man to end Ferrari’s 19-year wait for a title.Schumacher and Hamilton are the only two F1 drivers with seven world titlesGettyF1 icon Clear’s extensive career in motorsport’s elite spans three decades with both Mercedes and the Scuderia.During his tenure at the Silver Arrows, the 63-year-old worked as a race and performance engineer for Hamilton and Schumacher.He moved to Ferrari ahead of the 2015 season as the team’s head of engineering, and until 2026, was a driver coach for Leclerc.The latter is a nine-time Grand Prix winner, but his best finish in the drivers’ championship was his runner-up effort four years ago.Leclerc’s ex-driving coach claims he has good mental strength, but he makes mistakesJock, who left Ferrari early this year, has now revealed the single most underrated non-driving quality that separates a World Champion like Hamilton and Schumacher from a race winner like Leclerc, beyond raw talent.“Mental strength, I think,” He exclusively revealed in an interview with talkSPORT.com, via betselect.co.uk.”Putting together a season is mentally very, very stressful because once you’re leading a championship, your mentality or your mindset is vulnerable to being pulled in different directions.“Do you start to consolidate? Do you start to play it a little bit more conservatively? But you forget – the reason you’re leading the championship is that you had quite an aggressive stance earlier in the year. “So if you scored more points than your opponents in the first eight races and you’re leading, why don’t you just keep doing the same for the next eight races and lead by twice as much? “And then you think, well, I took some risks, so maybe those risks aren’t worth taking now. All of these things play on the mind. Hamilton and Leclerc are both battling to be the driver to end Ferrari’s long wait for a titleGetty“So I don’t know what the secret is, other than mental strength.“Having the ability to manage your emotions at stages in the season that become crucial to winning a championship. “I absolutely believe Leclerc can get there. Charles does have very good mental strength, but he does make mistakes. “At Monza, when he was on his own, there was no reason for that spin at all. And he’s had a couple of those. “He had one in Paul Ricard in 2022 too. I don’t fully understand those isolated once-a-year incidents that Charles has, but he is mentally very strong, and he has a very, very healthy level of self-confidence- not arrogance, but a good level of self-confidence that will put him in good stead when he’s in a position to really fight for a championship.”Someone whose mental strength cannot be doubted is Schumacher, who was often viewed as a driver who did whatever it took to win.Clear (left) was Hamilton’s performance engineer at MercedesGettyThe German was infamously disqualified from the 1997 season for intentionally driving his Ferrari into title rival Jacques Villeneuve at the season-ending European Grand Prix in Jerez.Only three years prior, the 57-year-old had won the first of his seven titles in controversial fashion by steering into Damon Hill.It was those antics that left Clear with a dim view of Schumacher by the time they worked together at Mercedes, which is where his opinion drastically flipped.Jock Clear on working with Michael Schumacher“We never talked about it,” he added to talkSPORT. “We never talked about traction control and all of that stuff in the Benetton years that the media was full of. Because why? I didn’t want to put him in a position where he felt he had to justify himself to me.“I took the guy at face value, and he treated me with such respect. We had a great relationship with Peter Bonnington, Andrew Shovlin, and Ross Brawn.“That little group came together and really created a very healthy atmosphere for Michael in ’11 and ’12. “And, you know, it just seemed like it was an irrelevant conversation at that point.”