Lewis Hamilton says he is “challenging” and “constantly battling” Ferrari’s engineers, getting them to try things with the set-up of the SF-25 as he waits for an upgrade package.

Swapping silver for red after 12 seasons as a Mercedes driver, Hamilton is finding the adjustment more difficult than expected.

Lewis Hamilton adamant Ferrari are making progress but…

Gearing up to start the Canadian Grand Prix from fifth on the grid, the Briton outqualified his team-mate Charles Leclerc for only the third time this season.

The Monegasque driver also has the better head-to-head stats in Grands Prix where he’s beaten Hamilton seven times, has three podiums to his team-mate’s zero, and sits ahead of him in the Drivers’ standings on 94 points to 71.

Neither Ferrari, though, has set the stage alight.

Although the Scuderia ended 2024 with one of the fastest cars on the grid, if not the fastest, they’ve been trounced by McLaren and find themselves in a battle with Max Verstappen and Mercedes to be best of the rest.

Leclerc’s most recent podium in Spain, where he was P3 behind the McLaren team-mates, elevated Ferrari to second in the Constructors’ Championship, with Hamilton saying they are making small progress, but he reiterated they need an upgrade to close the gap.

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“Just incremental steps,” Hamilton said. “I’m just trying to… We’ve not had any upgrades or anything like that so it’s the same car for quite some time now with the same package each weekend.

“I’m just challenging the guys and constantly battling the engineers, asking questions of it.

“They set things up, and are like ‘this is how we always do it’. And I’m like, ‘well, what about this?’

“And we work on trying things, and bit by bit, we are making progress.

“We’ve improved in our qualifying from Monaco onwards, which is positive, but ultimately we need upgrades. We need an upgrade to be able to fight the guys up front.”

Quizzed on his frustration over the lack of upgrades, which is an issue he’s mentioned many times before, Hamilton replied: “It’s my first half of the year in a new team. It’s interesting to see how different teams work and operate.

“There’s been times in my career where you’ve had a whole bunch of upgrades very, very early on in the season and you plough ahead very early, then you stop and taper off, and then sometimes it’s been slower.

“And, you know, here, it’s also the last year of this generation of cars and harder to find performance. And you could at least focus on the next year. The fact is, we this car hopefully we can still fight for a second in the Constructors’, that would be great.

“But I want to car that can win next year, so that’s priority.”

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