Lewis Hamilton will find it “difficult” to adapt to the Ferrari engine in F1 2025 having been powered by Mercedes throughout his Formula 1 career to date.

That is the claim of Mercedes simulator driver and Sky F1 pundit Anthony Davidson, who believes Hamilton can look to Aston Martin star Fernando Alonso for inspiration as he makes only the second team switch of his career.

Lewis Hamilton told to look to Fernando Alonso for inspiration at Ferrari

Hamilton is gearing up for his first season as a Ferrari driver having joined the Italian team from Mercedes on a multi-year contract from F1 2025.

The British driver claimed six of his joint-record seven World Championships, as well as becoming the first man in history to surpass 100 race wins and pole positions, at Mercedes between 2013 and 2024.

Hamilton has used Mercedes engines throughout his F1 career, with the German manufacturer powering every single one of his 356 starts stretching back to his debut season with McLaren in 2007.

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Reports from Italy last month claimed that Ferrari are in the process of ‘erasing’ Hamilton’s memory of Mercedes’ functions and systems by ‘deliberately’ setting up their simulator in an extreme way, a mission aimed at accelerating the driver’s adaptation to his new team.

Davidson, whose links to the Brackley-based Mercedes outfit stretch back to the team’s BAR-Honda era in the early 2000s, believes Hamilton will find it tricky to adapt to a new way of working at Ferrari.

Yet he believes the enduring success of Alonso, who has competed with Renault, Ferrari, Honda and Mercedes engines over the course of his long F1 career, proves it can be done.

Asked how long it will take for Hamilton’s muscle memory of his Mercedes career to fade, Davidson told RN365: “I think even he himself is keen to find out how long that is going to take.

“He’s come from having Mercedes power units his whole career and it is going to be difficult.

“No matter how good you are, it is going to be difficult to learn a new power unit.

“But then you look at Fernando Alonso who has driven loads of different power units.

“He comes from a similar background to Lewis in terms of experience and capabilities behind the wheel, so it can be done.”

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Davidson’s comments come after David Coulthard, the former McLaren and Red Bull driver, claimed that Hamilton’s lack of experience with the Ferrari engine contributed to his testing crash in Barcelona at the end of last month.

Appearing on the Formula For Success podcast, Coulthard said: “Going off is an occupational hazard.

“It doesn’t matter if you were the late great Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher or the current Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton, we can all have an off at any certain point.

“And I see it as simple as this: he has to get used to the control systems in that Ferrari, the power delivery.

“We’re dealing with hybrid engines, so it’s not the sort of natural torque acceleration of an internal combustion engine. Electrical energy comes in like that.

“And I suspect it was just [that] he’s so embedded in his mind about the Mercedes hybrid Formula 1 engine that he was simply caught out.

“It’ll take a few races [for Hamilton to adapt] because there’s a testing that a driver does where you are very consciously going through the ABCs of the braking, the turn in, the throttle application.

“You’re in that space because you’re developing the car and giving the feedback to the engineers.

“And then, of course, there’s racing, where you are just instinctively seeing and doing.

“You’re logging away what the car is doing on Lap 5 or Lap 10, or all of the good things that you need to do to continue to give the feedback, but it’s just your instinctive self when you’re in a grand prix.

“There’s two different elements of being a race driver.”

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