Leclerc and Nakamura at Monza: The No-Score Duel Before the Italian Grand Prix

Monza is not a football field, but before the Italian Grand Prix it was a stage for stories. Outside the circuit, the engines had not yet roared, instead there was a table placed where few noticed. I stood there, among the banners of a whisky brand, and saw Charles Leclerc sitting opposite Hikaru Nakamura. There was no finish line, no chequered flag. Only a game called SE!ZE, which the media described as a personalized chess-inspired game. The duel had no score. The official communication did not say who won. For someone used to reading football through numbers, that scene reminded me that sport does not always need a winner to be memorable. From an imaginary empty stand, I could still hear the applause of people watching at home. They were not applauding a goal or an overtake; they were applauding a moment when two people from different worlds leaned over the same chessboard. The context of this meeting lies somewhere between a commercial event and a statement about strategy. Chivas Regal 16 was the name behind it, and they did not hide their ambition: to place the product at the heart of a story about mastery. Leclerc is a Ferrari driver, a team followed by the whole world; Nakamura is a chess grandmaster who has turned concentration, precision and decision-making into an art form on the 64 squares. They came to Monza not to measure speed by laps, but to measure how people handle pressure. SE!ZE, according to the release, was a game inspired by chess. Each move tested both competitors’ ability to read the situation, anticipate and respond under pressure. But the important thing is that no sports referee stood up to certify the level of the two sides. The only thing highlighted was the transfer of abilities between two different fields. For me, that is the most interesting part. In twenty years of commentary, I have learned that tactics never live on paper. They live in the interval between perception and action. At Monza, that interval was compressed into a game without a name. In terms of data, the article gives us nothing for deep analysis. No number of moves, no time controls, no result. But I believe that data vacuum is intentional. When a brand creates a game for its two ambassadors to face off, announcing a winner would ruin the narrative of parallel greatness. If Leclerc wins, Nakamura is diminished; if Nakamura wins, Leclerc’s speed becomes something that can be beaten by a chess player. Staying silent about the result is the safest move, and in marketing, the safe move is sometimes the smartest one. But I do not want to stop at cynicism. Let us look at the two men before looking at the brand. Leclerc grew up in a world where every wrong decision can end in a crash at more than three hundred kilometres an hour. He does not have time to think like a classical chess player. He must read the situation, predict the trajectory, and make a choice in a fraction of a second. When a driver enters a corner, he does not analyse three options and choose the optimal one; he feels the grip, hears the tyres, looks in the mirror and acts. Nakamura is the opposite. He has spent his career slowing down time. In classical chess, a player can think for hours over one move, but in rapid and blitz chess, Nakamura is another beast. He plays by biological rhythm, by intuition sharpened by thousands of games. Some people say esports has no sweat. They have not seen Nakamura’s fingers tremble after a blitz game when the clock is down to seconds. So SE!ZE may not be real chess, nor a real race. It is an intersection between what people call intellect and reflex. It was designed to highlight a common trait: the ability to make decisions in an uncertain environment. I have followed many football matches where a team controlled seventy percent of possession but lost because of one minute of lapsed concentration. Football taught me that possession data is never proportional to results. But it also taught me that there is a statistic nobody writes down: the number of times a player chooses calm instead of panic. At Monza, I thought about those invisible statistics between the two men sitting opposite each other. Chivas Regal 16 is not a football sponsor, but their use of sporting figures reminded me of how a big club builds its image. No one remembers a brand because the product tastes good; they remember it because of the story attached. Likewise, no one remembers a team only for trophies, without rainy afternoons and people who never appear in the news. In my sports essays, I once wrote about a fan who sat through ninety minutes in the rain at Workers’ Stadium, not because he believed the team would win, but because he believed the team needed someone to be there. I remember my old sentence: “Rain over that park, memory is never allowed to dry.” Perhaps it is not necessary to repeat it here, but I felt it creeping into Monza when nobody asked Leclerc and Nakamura about the final move. This event is not part of the official Formula 1 championship or the World Chess Federation. It is a media product, and I have no financial data to analyse. There are no numbers about appearance fees, production budget or media value. I can only say that the appearance of a Ferrari driver during the Grand Prix week at Monza is always more expensive than any article can reflect. But Nakamura’s involvement is a way for the brand to reach a completely different audience: those who follow chess on digital platforms, those who watch streams, those who belong to a world that does not need engine noise. If I analysed this like a transfer deal, I would say Nakamura’s value lies not in direct revenue but in his ability to extend the story to an audience a Formula 1 driver normally cannot reach. Conversely, Leclerc brings glamour and speed. The combination creates a story whose reach is greater than the sum of its parts. But that story has a blind spot. The press release emphasises that “no decision is left to chance.” That is a beautiful phrase, but technically it is not sustainable. In Formula 1, everything can change because of a sudden rain, a mechanical failure, a well-timed safety car. In chess, even a great player can blunder under time pressure, no matter how much he practises. Even SE!ZE, if it has rules, must contain an element of uncertainty. No one can completely remove chance from a game involving humans. So I believe “leaving nothing to chance” is true only at one level: the level of organisation. They did not let chance decide who would appear on the news. They chose not to release the result, so that audience curiosity would outlive a single game. That is the most important strategic move, but nobody mentions it. Football has a saying I use often: the match only ends when the referee blows the whistle. But in commercial events, the contest never ends. It lives in social media posts, in comment threads asking “who won?”, and in the way a brand is mentioned more than the two people on screen. One detail made me think. The release said the meeting took place “before the Italian Grand Prix at Monza,” and the focus of the challenge was observing how two leading figures from completely different disciplines transferred their abilities. The word “observing” is important. Not “competing,” not “duelling,” but “observing.” They placed two people at a table and made them objects of public contemplation, like putting a painting next to a piece of music to see which one triggers stronger emotion. I thought about that question all evening. Then I remembered sitting in a commentary box for a match without spectators during the pandemic. The stadium was empty, but I could still hear the applause of people at home. They were not clapping for the team; they were clapping for themselves, for the habit of living with football. At Monza, I had a similar feeling. Nobody really cared who won SE!ZE, because the real victory already belonged to the moment those two people sat down at the same table. There is an irony I find amusing: a whisky brand, usually associated with relaxed moments, chose an intellectual duel for promotion. But perhaps that was intentional. Mastery, in any field, does not come from improvisation but from repeating the basics until they become instinct. A good bartender is like a good racer or a good chess player: they have all swallowed thousands of hours of practice to create one beautiful moment. If I were to count seconds the Japanese way, I would not count down from five, four, three, two, one. I would count what remains after this duel: a story about two people who would never have met without a brand acting as a bridge. Leclerc and Nakamura may never meet again outside similar events. But on an afternoon at Monza, they showed that the boundary between speed sport and mind sport is thinner than we think. Fans often ask me what the most important tactic in a match is. I never answer with a diagram. I say it is how the team handles the three minutes after conceding a goal. Those three minutes do not appear in the data, but they decide everything. In SE!ZE, there was no goal conceded, no period of being pushed back. Therefore, the story of resilience was not tested. We only saw two people in perfect control, which makes me wonder: did SE!ZE truly reveal the nature of decision-making under pressure, or did it only show a sanitised version of pressure? That question has no answer in the release. But if I had to write a final line for this article, I would not talk about Chivas Regal, nor about marketing tricks, nor about who would win at Monza that weekend. I would write about a boy watching racing and a boy playing chess, each growing up in a different world but learning the same lesson: you cannot control everything, but you can control how you react to what you cannot control. That no-score duel is ultimately also a lesson in humility. Nobody raised a hand in victory, nobody bowed in defeat. The two men stood up, shook hands, and let the event end in an ellipsis. Football taught me that the best matches are not always the ones with many goals, and Monza this time had no goals but still left a similar feeling. In a sporting world increasingly obsessed with measuring everything, sometimes the most valuable thing an event can give us is a silence without metrics. I left as darkness fell. The lights on the circuit were not yet fully on, and I did not know who won. I did not need to know. Because the memory of a no-score duel, like the memory of rain over an old park, never needs a conclusion to become real.