Ferrari chassis technical director Loic Serra is adamant Lewis Hamilton’s difficulties during the ground-effect era with Mercedes do “not scare” him, even though the Briton won only two races in three years.

Hamilton is officially a Ferrari driver, the Briton having made the move over the winter after saying goodbye to Mercedes after 12 years with the Silver Arrows.

Lewis Hamilton blamed ‘worst’ cars, Mercedes questioned driving style

It was not the farewell that Hamilton had hoped for as his struggles continued in the Mercedes ground-effect aerodynamic F1 cars.

The first of those cars from 2022, the W13, he said was “not far off the experience” of the wretched McLaren MP4-24 while he billed the 2023 car, the W14, the “evil sister” of its predecessor.

As for the 2024 W15, that started out feeling “like a race car” at the beginning of the season but ended the year being called the “worst I’ve ever driven” by the seven-time World Champion.

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This final season with the team culminated in the 105-time Grand Prix winner losing both the qualifying and race head-to-head against George Russell.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin put it down to the ground-effect cars not suiting Hamilton’s driving style.

“He’s struggled with this whole generation of car, really, not suiting his style,” he said, adding: “He simply has difficulties with them, especially on one lap. His long run pace is always there. And that was also very helpful.

“It’s more about how he wants to attack a corner. When he does that, the car jumps into oversteer – and the tyre temperatures go up. A big part of our work was to give him a car that you can drive with this very attacking style and get the lap time out of it – without it breaking away on the way there and giving him surprises.”

It remains to be seen if Hamilton will be able to overcome those issues and master Ferrari’s ground-effect car.

However, Serra, who knows the Briton well from their time together at Mercedes and played a role in Hamilton’s run of championship successes as the team’s performance director, isn’t worried.

“Lewis’ difficulties seen on the track in the last period? They don’t scare me,” Serra, Ferrari’s Chassis Technical Director, told Gazzetta dello Sport.

“He is an extraordinary driver who is always thirsty for new challenges and who, I am sure, will be as fast at Ferrari as in his best years at the helm of F1.”

The 40-year-old covered his first laps in the 2025 Ferrari at the Fiorano circuit on Wednesday and told the media that from the get-go he felt comfortable in the car.

“I don’t feel that currently, I’m having to change my driver’s style too much,” he revealed. “I’m actually feeling quite comfortable in the car and just taking one step at a time.

“I hope, and we’ll see as we get further down the line at the real race circuits that we go into, just how much aligned and how much change I might need to do. But the key is to be open-minded and be dynamic.”

Serra isn’t the only former Mercedes team member that Hamilton is spending time with at Ferrari as he’s also been reunited with Toto Wolff’s former, albeit brief, right-hand man Jerome D’Ambrosio.

The deputy team principal believes his relationship with his former driver has made the move from Mercedes to Ferrari seamless as the deputy Ferrari team principal not only knows Hamilton but also his personal team.

“I think more than necessarily Lewis himself, he doesn’t need any help into being introduced in a team or get to know people,” D’Ambrosio told the media including PlanetF1.com at the F1 75 event. “He is quite amazing with people and obviously the team already loves him, after the first day it was so.

“The areas, perhaps, where it’s been quite useful is already knowing his team. A driver doesn’t come alone in a team, but they’ve got their own team, their own management, the people around them have already interacted with them in a past life.

“I guess in that respect, it was quite, let’s say, easy to understand where the expectations were, and what was the background and what could already just be plug and play and what maybe had to be approached slightly differently based on a different environment.”

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