Lewis Hamilton has been warned he needs to bring passion and spark to Ferrari if he is to turn things around after a difficult start to life with Maranello.

The seven-time F1 World Champion has struggled to keep pace with Charles Leclerc over the first quarter of the F1 2025 season, and a record-breaking eighth world title appears but a pipe dream at present.

Jacques Villeneuve: Not the right image to show Ferrari

After the excitement of the switch from Mercedes to Ferrari, what had been a positive start to the partnership has turned into something thoroughly morose after the first six races as Hamilton has been unable to gel yet with the SF-25.

Hamilton has been open about his problems adjusting to the car, acknowledging that the issues are primarily on his side, and hasn’t been able to yet offer a timeline as to when things may turn around for him.

In Miami, Hamilton also showed his annoyance with Ferrari’s pit wall calls as he was frustrated by hesitant decision-making, calling out the team for what he said was ‘not good teamwork’.

But, with results not in his favour at the moment, Hamilton’s downbeat demeanour is not going to win Ferrari over, according to 1997 F1 World Champion Jacques Villeneuve.

“You can hear that Lewis Hamilton is not happy at all. Charles Leclerc has been stepping up more and more,” he told Vision4Sport.

“And you can hear it in Lewis’s comments, ‘I’m sorry’. It’s like Norris, once you start doing this, you’re burnt. You lose your credibility, and people lose trust in you. They think he’s only there for the ride now.

“That’s not the right image to show to a team like Ferrari, who are so fickle. Ferrari are like a volcano. You need those fireworks. You need the passion, the spark to set things off. If you don’t have the sparks, that’s a problem at Ferrari. There’s not much time.”

It was a similar story at Mercedes last season, with Hamilton struggling to keep pace with George Russell. But, unlike at Mercedes where he had the benefit of a long-established pedigree and history, no such luxuries have been established with Ferrari.

“At Mercedes, he was allowed to take his time. Not Ferrari. You need to be up there and bang,” Villeneuve said.

“The sprint race in China seemed to be the spark. But no fire came out after that. There was no dry grass around to catch fire!

“The key thing for Lewis was to get to Ferrari with a new family and a new energy. Not a carry-on of what he had been living at Mercedes, which was relying on him thinking, ‘It will be easy because I’m so good’.

“That’s not how it works at Ferrari. And it’s really odd.

“The key point is how it will be once they all get back to Europe. They haven’t had time to take a breather. It’s been a gruesome schedule. He seems to be at a loss for why things aren’t working out for him. Let’s wait until Monaco. Then we will see what happens.”

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While things haven’t worked out quite as well as either side probably envisaged just a few short months ago, Villeneuve said it’s not too late for Hamilton to show his quality and prove to Ferrari that the call to hire him was the right one.

“Lewis still brings a lot of image to the team, so I don’t see any issues just yet,” he said.

“It’s how much he starts doubting that’s the problem. If he starts doubting too much, then it will be hard to recover.

“I don’t know Lewis well enough. It’s really hard to know and understand Lewis. He has his own protective bubble, so it’s really hard to read.

“He spent all those years at Mercedes, overly protected. And that seemed at the time to have been a necessity. Now he is not used to being exposed, and he doesn’t know how to react to it particularly well. I guess he wasn’t expecting what had happened at all.”

The issue for Hamilton, Villeneuve believes, could be down to the fact that Hamilton has been drained by the last few years – seasons of stress and turmoil in less competitive machinery having dealt with the shock of his title loss in 2021.

“It’s very draining because Lewis Hamilton had a few bad years at Mercedes that were draining; the championship loss to Max Verstappen, that’s when it started,” the French-Canadian said.

“The new Ferrari was supposed to be exciting and fun, and it was with that sprint race. Then suddenly it’s a continuity of the last few years at Mercedes.

“The Italian crowd is a harder crowd. It’s not an easy place to be. He’s managed to bounce back in the past. He’s not weak. It just depends on who he has around him. He just needs a couple of people to be able to lean on.

“Last year, the car didn’t seem too complicated to drive. You have to ask the question whether he is with an engineer who he can actually work with. We were talking earlier about the freedom Max Verstappen has at Red Bull.

“Does Lewis have any freedom to work on his setup, on where he wants to go? Or is it a team that tells its drivers to drive and shut up? You just don’t know.”

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