Lewis Hamilton left ‘disappointed’ in Ferrari for one reason after frustrating Australian Grand Prix debut

Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari debut wasn’t the roaring success that several of his predecessors have enjoyed in the past.

World champions Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen won their first Formula 1 races driving for Ferrari, while Sebastian Vettel was on the podium at the Australian Grand Prix exactly 10 years before Lewis Hamilton’s first outing.

However, the encouraging early pace Ferrari showed during practice in Melbourne quickly disappeared.

Hamilton and teammate Charles Leclerc could only qualify on the fourth row of the grid and they both struggled to make progress from there.

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur wasn’t happy with the communication between Hamilton and his race engineer across the weekend and it was clear that his relationship with Riccardo Adami needs to develop.

The car needs work as well with McLaren certainly having an advantage over the rest of the field, while Red Bull and Mercedes had an advantage both in the searing heat of qualifying and the damp conditions of the race.

Journalist Edd Straw was speaking on The Race’s YouTube channel after the race in Australia about Hamilton’s debut.

While the seven-time world champion didn’t seem too downbeat after the race, he was left ‘disappointed’ with one aspect of how the Grand Prix unfolded.

Lewis Hamilton ‘disappointed’ Ferrari didn’t warn him about more rain at the Australian Grand Prix

It was put to Straw that Hamilton wasn’t enjoying his race leading up to the final safety and deluge of rain and he said: “Yeah, he just didn’t know the car in the wet, so it was a massive learning experience.

“To be honest, he looked relatively content after the race, I heard from him in the pen after and he was kind of quite sanguine and happy with the progress he’d made.

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“The funny thing is, if there’d been a red flag when those two cars were off, [Liam] Lawson and [Gabriel] Bortoleto, there was a brief window where Ferrari could have started first and second and Hamilton could have hung on and won his first Ferrari race.

“That wasn’t to be, they had to make the stop later and it’s just a bit of a disaster.

“Hamilton [was] disappointed the team didn’t warn him there was a second bank of rain there because he said, well I got through the first, it was all right, but I didn’t know that was coming.”

How Lewis Hamilton’s first Ferrari F1 result compares to Charles Leclerc

Although Ferrari narrowly missed out on winning the constructors’ championship last year, they appear to have fallen slightly down the pecking order.

However, it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from a single race which was run in wet conditions.

Unfortunately for Hamilton, his Ferrari debut ranks among some of the worst in terms of final result out of the team’s most recent drivers.

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Leclerc only had one season of Formula 1 experience under his belt before earning a promotion to Ferrari from Sauber.

He managed to achieve a P5 finish at the 2019 Australian Grand Prix on his debut before achieving his first podium for the team at the following race in Bahrain.

Hamilton will hope he can follow that trend and not lose too much ground to the likes of Lando Norris, Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri as he gets up to speed with the team.