Leclerc headed to Silverstone very much on the back foot in his intra-team battle with Ferrari teammate Lewis Hamilton, trailing the veteran in the standings after finishing behind him in five consecutive races.
That trend looked set to continue on Hamilton's home turf when the Englishman claimed pole position for the sprint race, but Leclerc responded by qualifying a place ahead for the main race before passing Kimi Antonelli at the start and storming to victory.
After doing so, he admitted that narratives of him being inferior to Hamilton have bothered him, and that they made his win extra satisfying.
"It means a lot," he said in the post-race press conference. "It means a lot because when things get tough, and that's literally the situation I've been in the last few races, obviously there's a lot of negativity around me in general, with narratives being created, and it's never a nice environment to work in.
"But to keep our head down and to keep working very hard and get the result that we got today, I'm super proud of the whole team that have been pushing me and helping me to find that feeling again with the car."
When asked to talk more about the negative narratives he mentioned, the Monagasque clarified that he never doubted himself, and has done his best to block out the noise and stay focused on improving.
"I try to not look at my phone and focus on what is relevant, in order to also have the right picture of the situation, because things are said and you go from hero to zero, from zero to hero, in like two days in this sport, and so it can influence the way you see a situation," he said.
"My job was really to just try and cancel that noise, to not look at anything, to not listen to anything.
"And I know that I didn't become a bad driver from one day to the other. It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car. These cars are very specific, are very different to the way we've been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it."