Lewis Hamiton’s first races for Ferrari have been mixed, with the seven-time world champion taking his first victory for them in the Chinese Grand Prix Sprint but later getting disqualified in the main race for a technical infringement.
The race in Melbourne was also a tricky start to his season at Maranello, with Ferrari missing out on an opportunity to leapfrog their rivals in the changable conditions.
Hamilton spent most of the race telling his engineer, Riccardo Adami, to not repeat commands and to reduce the amount of information he was telling him. Peter Windsor felt Hamilton and Ferrari should have sorted out their problems in pre-season testing, as it appeared to show they were unprepared.
Ferrari spent much of the pre-season getting Hamilton used to their car’s characteristics and focusing on the operational side of their race weekends. In Bahrain, only Charles Leclerc managed to complete a long run on each of their tyres after Hamilton suffered a technical setback on the third day.
Discussing how the first two race weekends went with the Maranello squad, Hamilton admitted that he made a similar mistake to what he did while at Mercedes in the last couple of seasons when speaking to Sky Sports.
Lewis Hamilton did first long-run in Chinese GP Sprint
One of the things that characterised Hamilton’s final races at Mercedes was the swings in performance between days on race weekends. The team would make a setup change overnight from Friday to Saturday, and it would completely change the car balance.
Technical director James Allison said Mercedes ‘primary focus’ was eliminating this with their 2025 challenger, while Hamilton appears to have made a similar mistake in his early races with Ferrari having gone into the first races of the season without a proper read on the SF-25’s vulnerabilities.
“I was reflecting after the first race and I didn’t get to do the Abu Dhabi test. All the other drivers got to test the 2025 tyres and then when it came to do the Bahrain test, I didn’t even get to do my long run because we broke down,” said Hamilton.
“So my first long run in the dry, 20 laps, was actually the China Sprint race. I was quite happy with how I treated those tyres and then Sunday we made some changes to the car and it wasn’t the right direction which made it difficult for qualifying and then the race. But lots of learnings to take from those two weeks and I feel it’s really helped us prepare better moving forward.”
Lewis Hamilton explains why Pirelli tyres ‘can be a challenge’
Pirelli tyres are often referred to as a ‘dark art’ in F1 because of how tricky they are to get into the so-called performance ‘window’ whereby drivers can extract the most performance over a lap without taking too much life out of them.
Shanghai was a high-degradation circuit, with Pirelli even adjusting the minimum starting pressures overnight by 1psi between Friday and Saturday after noticing higher wear rates than expected.
Hamilton explained this was one of the challenges he is having to get used to at Ferrari, with his aggressive driving style naturally making it harder for him to control the rear tyre temperatures.
“Getting the tyres in the window can be a challenge. I think having them in sync [is tough]. You can have the rears in the window and the fronts not in the window, you kind of want to enter the first corner with the rear slightly below and through the corner they come up,” said Hamilton.
“If you start with too hot temperatures, the third sector is often an issue. If you start too cold you have instabilities and lose time in sector one and you might gain some in the next two. But trying to find a balance between the two is a real challenge.”
Hamilton’s win in the Sprint race showed the Ferrari is kind on its tyres in clean air, which means if he can hook things up in qualifying, there is potential for the team to challenge rivals McLaren and Red Bull for victories.
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