Lewis Hamilton admits that the Ferrari car “feels so alien” to him as he continues his battle to adapt after joining from Mercedes.

But, it is a battle which Hamilton himself has admitted he is currently losing after a fresh defeat against Charles Leclerc in Bahrain.

Can Lewis Hamilton get to grips with ‘alien’ Ferrari?

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

While Hamilton does have the China Sprint pole and win on his CV after making his blockbuster move to Ferrari, it is so far a union which is not quite living up to the billing.

Four grands prix into the season and Hamilton has finished behind team-mate Leclerc in all of them, while a six-tenths deficit to the Monegasque in Bahrain qualifying left Hamilton making a confession which sounded concerningly similar to his downbeat verdicts at times in a challenging final year at Mercedes.

“I’m just not doing a good enough job on my side so I’ve just got to keep improving,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com.

Asked what he can do to instigate said improvement, Hamilton responded: “I really don’t know. I don’t have a lot of answers for you guys, I just wasn’t quick today.”

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And while Hamilton was more upbeat after the Grand Prix – in which he recovered to P5 at the chequered flag – he nonetheless stressed how out of his comfort zone the Ferrari SF-25 operates, as he looks to evolve and master it.

“It just feels so alien, it really does feel so alien,” he said of Ferrari’s F1 2025 challenger.

“Sometimes I think we all [as drivers] get stuck in our ways, very stuck, ‘I need to keep driving the way I’ve been driving, just make the car come to me a bit’, and that’s not working.

“So I’m adjusting myself to the car, and also just the way the tools that they use, it just drives so much differently.”

To offer “just one example” of that, Hamilton added: “I’ve never used engine braking before in the past 12 years, but here we use a lot of engine braking to turn the car.

“We have much different brakes, the brakes are so much different to what I had in the past.

“In the last stint I had to use the rears to turn the car, and other times you have to put more weight on the front, so it’s probably a bigger balance window than I’m used to as well.”

Next up this weekend is the final round of F1 2025’s first triple-header, the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Hamilton goes into that event P7 in the Drivers’ Championship standings, seven points and two positions behind Leclerc.

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