Lewis Hamilton has made it clear that he is not about to walk away after a challenging start to F1 life at Ferrari.

However, with Charles Leclerc having gained the upper hand on his seven-time World Champion team-mate – with an alarming gap over one lap having opened up – former Haas F1 team boss Guenther Steiner is “more concerned” about what this is doing mentally to Formula 1’s most successful driver.

Lewis Hamilton Ferrari struggles: A mental game?

Despite taking Sprint victory in China, overall it has been a bumpy road for Hamilton so far in his Ferrari career, having failed to finish ahead of new team-mate Leclerc across the opening five grands prix, while in the most recent Bahrain and Saudi Arabia rounds, he was over half a second off Leclerc’s one-lap pace.

And the comments coming from Hamilton in recent race weekends have been concerning, from talk of there being “no fix” and a “painful” season ahead, to hinting that the Ferrari higher-ups are losing patience.

The situation led to six-time grand prix winner Ralf Schumacher teasing that Hamilton may opt to quit at the end of F1 2025 if things do not improve, a theory quashed by Hamilton in a new message to his fans.

“Please keep your fingers crossed. I’m not going to give up,” he told a London crowd.

“We’re going to keep getting better. Still we rise, right?”

Steiner would weigh in on Hamilton and Ferrari during an appearance on the Red Flags podcast, where he explained that he is “more concerned” about what these struggles up against Leclerc and doing mentally to Hamilton.

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Asked for his response to a prompt of ‘Hamilton’s gap to Leclerc is cause for concern’, Steiner replied: “It is slowly becoming a concern.

“I’m more concerned about what he thinks about, you know, when he’s asking about where I lost time, and then ‘jeez’, it’s like, yeah, the engineer can tell you where you’re losing the time, but for sure, he cannot make you understand why you’re losing it. That’s down to you.

“And the worst thing would be if Lewis is losing his confidence, because then it will be a backwards race. It is a concern, in my opinion.

“And obviously, they will work on it, and Lewis will be the first one to work on it. How they get out, I have no idea.”

Hamilton sits P7 in the Drivers’ Championship, two places and 16 points behind Leclerc.

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