Can Hamilton avoid Vettel's mistakes in taking on Leclerc at Ferrari?

Whisper it – but sharing a garage with a seven-time world champion could mean less rather than more pressure on Charles Leclerc in 2025. That’s because Leclerc, according to those close to the team, has nothing to lose unless Hamilton regularly beats him by a huge margin – and, going on recent form, that’s unlikely. 

Hamilton’s presence actually puts Leclerc in an enviably strong position: if he wins races, even the championship, he’s beaten one of the greatest drivers of all time. If he doesn’t, well – being overcome by a multiple world champion is a lesser-order loss than being beaten by any other team-mate. Indubitably his reputation will be diminished less than on those occasions when Carlos Sainz has got the better of him in recent seasons. 

Leclerc has already – much earlier in his career – got the better of a four-time world champion.
And yet questions still remain: will it be a fair fight? Will the car be quick enough to win races and titles? And is Lewis, now approaching his 40th birthday,
still the complete competitor who broke long-cherished records held by his hero, Ayrton Senna? 

How good will Ferrari be in 2025? 

While the general perception is
that Hamilton is banking on Ferrari to be on top when the rules change in 2026, his best chance of achieving his desired outcome – winning an eighth title – may actually be next year.  

In terms of car concept, Ferrari has been relatively strong out of the blocks in the last two rule revisions, the ‘wide-body’ change of 2017 and the return to ground effect in 2022. But certain key engineers involved at those inflection points – notably David Sanchez and Enrico Cardile – have subsequently moved on. 

More significantly, the 2026 technical package involves major changes to aerodynamics and the power units – indeed, active aero will be relied upon to counterbalance a reduction in overall power as electrical deployment plays a greater role. 

 The presence of more than one major variable could lead to a 2014-style scenario in which one team or engine manufacturer has a big advantage. 2026 may not be a “lottery”, to use the words of one well-informed paddock insider, but many uncertainties remain. 

Could Ferrari's best bet at a world title actually end up being in Hamilton's first season at the squad?

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Nevertheless, Ferrari is confident enough in its development capabilities that it chose not to get involved in a bidding war with Aston Martin for Adrian Newey’s services this summer. That may seem counter-intuitive, given Ferrari’s mid-season performance was such that Hamilton went into what can only be described as a sulk when asked – during the British Grand Prix weekend – whether he still felt he had made the right choice. But actually, while the Scuderia’s form has fluctuated through 2024, the trend line is going in the right direction. 

Ferrari’s progress has been masked to some extent by the attention lavished upon McLaren’s rapid ascent to championship-challenger status. Ahead of the
final six races its points tally stood at 441, 119 more than at the 18-race mark last year. This put Ferrari
just over 30 points behind Red
Bull, which had 704 points after 18 races last year. Perceptions have been skewed thanks to the events of late spring and early summer:
while McLaren’s big Miami
upgrade proved very successful, 
Ferrari’s new floor (added in Barcelona) was only partially so, generating more downforce but making the rear end more prone
to ‘bouncing’ 2022-style. 

But Ferrari bounced back after the summer break,
with Leclerc winning at Monza
and then coming close to another victory in Baku (Ferrari has also won in Austin and Mexico City since original publication - ed). Insiders put this down to a breakthrough in understanding, allied to a summer shutdown of the wind tunnel to replace the old-fashioned metal-based rolling road with one that more accurately simulates an asphalt surface.  

Qualifying has therefore become a bigger arbiter of results again – and here, apart from a difficult spell earlier this season when he struggled to bring his tyres to the right temperature, Leclerc is king

And that could be the key for
both Leclerc and Hamilton in 2025. With Ferrari only a few
tenths behind McLaren on average, it’s the Scuderia, not Red Bull, that is seen in the paddock as McLaren’s potential number-one rival next year. Those close to Ferrari are certain that even if the team is still behind McLaren at the start of next year’s campaign, it won’t simply capitulate and shift resources to
the 2026 project.

The question then is which of the drivers is better placed to maximise the opportunity. Leclerc begins with the advantage of having deep-rooted working relationships within the team, despite this season’s somewhat cryptically communicated change of race engineer at Imola. He knows the quirks of the organisation as well as the car. All of these Lewis will have to learn quickly. 

Hamilton is famous for thriving when he has the right car and there’s a big result on the horizon – and the prospect of not just an eighth title, but a Ferrari one,
can surely rekindle the killer
instinct that many believe he’s starting to lose. But to beat Leclerc, Lewis would have to be at the
top of his game. 

Hamilton and Leclerc will fight for top dog status at Ferrari

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

A qualified success 

Among the more regrettable trends of the past season or two has been a regression towards processional races. A key target of the shift to ground-effect was to generate more overtaking by enabling cars to follow one another more closely through corners. But ongoing development has made the cars more disruptive to those following in their wake, and the sensitivity of the Pirelli tyres continues to be an issue. The majority of overtaking moves are now enabled by DRS – which the architects of ground effect hoped would be redundant by now. 

Qualifying has therefore become a bigger arbiter of results again – and here, apart from a difficult spell earlier this season when he struggled to bring his tyres to the right temperature, Leclerc is king. 

Given that Hamilton has achieved more pole positions in his career than any other driver, including Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, this statement requires some (pardon the pun) qualification. A prime caveat is the relative underperformance of Mercedes during the ground effect era – Lewis has registered just one
pole position for a grand prix
since 2021. But there are other reasons and Hamilton is the first
to admit that he has struggled to
hit previous heights. 

On Saturday in Monza, he was particularly frustrated with himself. “The chance I’ve got to fight for a race win is out the window,” he lamented after qualifying sixth. “I just didn’t do the job. I didn’t extract the maximum. Just absolutely ridiculous from my side, completely unacceptable. And that is totally me, nobody else. 

“I’ve got to find myself in qualifying. My race pace is great.
I just need to figure out how to get back to my old self.” 

This was all said after Lewis was just 0.073s slower than George Russell on his Q3 lap – but as F1’s battle at the top gets ever tighter, two drivers squeezed into the tiny gap between the Mercedes duo. And that’s largely been the story of Hamilton’s qualifying this year. 

When Russell first arrived at Mercedes in 2022, it was Hamilton who had the upper hand in qualifying over the season as a whole, although the picture was skewed by Lewis pursuing experimental set-ups early on in
a bid to ‘debug’ the troublesome W13. In comparable sessions Hamilton outqualified Russell 11-5. But now it’s Russell who is ahead most of the time – 12-9 last year and 13-5 in 2024. 

Hamilton has recently lost his qualifying edge, with Russell now on top over the single-lap stakes

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The margins are small. Not
only in Monza, but also in Australia, in both the sprint shoot-out and qualifying in Miami, Monaco and Austria, Russell was less than a tenth of a second quicker, and in most of the other sessions the gap was around 0.2s. 

Discounting cretinous online conspiracy theories accusing Mercedes of sabotaging Hamilton, what is behind this small but significant disparity? Is Russell getting faster or is Hamilton getting slower, owing to age and this generation of cars not suiting his style? Again, there are questions of perception here since George has only had a consistently frontrunning car once – when he substituted for Lewis at Sakhir in 2020. 

“George has always set a very high bar in qualifying,” insists Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin. “And as soon as he was in F1, he was impressing. Even in the Williams, he was doing some pretty impressive qualifying sessions, so we know that he’s very quick. 

"I would say in my career, I would never say I have had massive problems with the tyres. But I’m
not sure it is necessarily the tyres,
I think it is the type of car. The
car is more on a knife-edge than ever" Lewis Hamilton

“Lewis hasn’t disguised the fact that Saturdays were his tough day. He’s struggled with this 
whole generation of car, really,
not suiting his style. 

“He’s been working on how he drives. But we had a huge amount of work trying to get the car to be quicker – it just hasn’t been quick enough – but also with a handling balance that the drivers can actually attack the lap on Saturday.”

This echoes what Lewis himself said after qualifying in Hungary. 

“It is just with these tyres for some reason, I don’t like the way they drive,” he explained. “I have sucked in qualifying for quite a while. I am still working at it to try and improve. But at some stage, it will come. Just keep working at it. 

Both the current generation of tyres and cars appear not to suit Hamilton's driving style in qualifying

Photo by: Mark Sutton

“I would say in my career, I would never say I have had massive problems with the tyres. But I’m
not sure it is necessarily the tyres,
I think it is the type of car. The
car is more on a knife-edge than ever and it doesn’t like when you brake late, deep and make a corner a ‘v’. You have to brake early and roll the speed in. I hate that, it’s
just not me and not my kind of
way of driving the car. I find that really frustrating.” 

If you believe James Allison it’s almost as if Lewis is trying too hard. 

“The current car tyre combo, not just us, across the pitlane: it doesn’t like being hustled,” Allison explained recently in relation to Hamilton’s qualifying struggles. “You almost get the best lap times when you’re not trying. And every weekend, in some session or other, you’ll see some car and you think, ‘How did that get there?’ And then they don’t do it again. It sort of disappears in the mist straight after. And I think in qualifying it’s quite hard – where you’re all pumped up and you’re wanting to get the best from it – to do a lap that is sort of relaxed enough to get the best out of the car. 

“When the car is producing good laps, the drivers are almost like, ‘I wasn’t expecting that. I was almost cruising’. And when it’s qualifying, the pressure’s on and it’s time to deliver, I don’t think those are the circumstances that get the best from quite fussy tyres.” 

Whatever it is, Lewis knows he needs to sort it out sooner rather than later, because not only will the cars stay essentially the same next year, but in Leclerc he will have a team-mate regarded as among the best qualifiers on the grid. 

Is Leclerc cut from the same cloth as Gilles Villeneuve? 

It’s not just Leclerc’s qualifying speed that Hamilton must take into account, but his overall form and growing maturity. 

Leclerc’s 2024 campaign is by far his strongest to date. He quickly reached an understanding of those early qualifying problems and cured them by improving his attention to detail on out-laps. In the first eight races of the season, he finished no lower than fourth and the decline that followed coincided with Ferrari’s most troubled phase of the year. This included a couple of mistakes in qualifying, a strategy gamble that went wrong at Silverstone, and a generally poor weekend in Austria.

Comparisons between Leclerc and Villeneuve have continued to increase during the Monegasque's time at Ferrari

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

The Ferrari faithful like to draw parallels between Leclerc and another driver beloved of the Scuderia, Gilles Villeneuve. Certainly, Leclerc’s formative years in F1 have demonstrated great speed allied with a tendency to
step over the limit – notably in the first half of 2022 when he seemed to be in contention with Max Verstappen for the championship. And while Villeneuve’s heroics are woven into the tapestry of F1, he has his detractors who believe his desire to win every lap came at the cost of winning races and titles (though these claims discount the fact that in the only full season in which he had a properly competitive Ferrari, 1979, he played dutiful team-mate to eventual champion Jody Scheckter). 

“He [Leclerc] is a very courageous and very... he’s a very risky driver,” says veteran La Gazzetta dello Sport journalist Pino Allievi, who also knew Villeneuve in his pomp. “If he knows the car is 90% he tries to find inside himself the missing 10%. He takes a lot of risk – but he is obliged to because he doesn’t have a competitive Ferrari, this is the problem.” 

Ex-Ferrari team principal
Mattia Binotto was among the first to make the Villeneuve comparison – albeit in a positive way – when defending Leclerc as the 2022 campaign began to misfire. 

"Belonging to Ferrari means strengthening the myth of the Cavallino. There are few drivers who can do that and I think Charles is one of them, as is
Gilles [Villeneuve]" Mattia Binotto

“When I look at Charles, it’s the way he drives, his talent and above all the passion that the fans have for him,” Binotto said. “Belonging to Ferrari means strengthening the myth of the Cavallino. There are few drivers who can do that and I think Charles is one of them, as is
Gilles [Villeneuve]. Gilles was fantastic. He may have only won six races, but he remains the driver par excellence for all Tifosi and the Cavallino. It was his way of driving, his way of behaving. It’s the passion that he showed. 

“And I think Charles has that too, and that’s a great thing. We’re also very passionate ourselves and we hope he wins more than six races.” 

Romance and drama aside, are the parallels between Leclerc and Villeneuve that strong now? Post-Barcelona dip aside, Charles has been both fast and incredibly consistent this season, never putting team boss Frederic Vasseur in the uncomfortable position of having
to explain his choices: in almost all the races where both Leclerc and Sainz have finished this year, Charles has been in front.

If questions remain over Leclerc’s ability to string together race wins into a successful title campaign, surely the same cannot be said for
a seven-time champion?  

Leclerc has notched up the wins for Ferrari, but can be make a sustained title challenge?

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Well, there are those who point out that six of Hamilton’s drivers’ championships were built on the foundation of having the best car on the grid – and that in 2016, the one that got away, he became paranoid to the extent of openly suggesting that his engine failures were the result of malign interference by unspecified parties. 

However, as Gilles Villeneuve’s son Jacques ably proved by making very heavy weather of the 1997 world championship, gaining full benefit from the best car is a skill in itself. Apart from those well-publicised struggles to make the car work for him in qualifying, Hamilton continues to execute races well. Scrappy weekends such as Imola 2021, when he was lucky to escape a clumsy-looking off-track moment in the wet, remain outliers that are memorable for being exceptions rather than a rule. 

Equality street

Among the more vexing questions is one of treatment: can Ferrari support two number-one drivers? This scenario is always easier to achieve when the car is below-par – drivers who have just become team-mates can bond over its inadequacies and more easily co-operate to improve it. With a fast car, fireworks ensue as they scrabble to get an edge – witness how Hamilton and Rosberg, supposedly childhood friends, became bitter enemies once equipped with frontrunning machinery. 

In public at least, Ferrari has committed to equal treatment. There has been talk of putting “maximum effort” into helping Hamilton win an eighth world championship – though insiders
say this just encouraging noise for the new signing and a gentle nudge to Leclerc to give his best. The reality is that Vasseur would be foolish to sacrifice Leclerc’s ambitions for Hamilton, since Charles remains the centrepiece
of Ferrari’s long-term plans. 

Leclerc had been part of Ferrari’s young-driver ladder before he joined the team in 2019, only his second year in F1, almost instantly making it his own – at the expense of his new team-mate, Sebastian Vettel, a four-time champion. He swung the team his way through sheer performance as Vettel in effect went to pieces. Tensions between the two built to the point where Seb virtually inked in his own firing from the team when he precipitated a race-ending collision with Leclerc in Brazil that year. 

Beneath Leclerc’s outward appearance of ingenuous bonhomie is a steely competitor – as demonstrated at Monza in 2019, when Charles had been given a ‘tow’ by Seb in the first Q3 runs but then took advantage of other competitors running slowly to avoid returning the favour. That earned Leclerc pole position and a stern rebuke from Binotto – all forgotten in the glow of his victory a day later. 

Leclerc and Vettel clashing as team-mates effectively saw the end of the German's Ferrari career

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Hamilton once engaged in such shenanigans at the beginning of 
his F1 career but has built a well-earned reputation for ‘racing clean’ ever since, and would take a poor view. 

Another key difference from the 2019 scenario is that Vettel was always on unsteady political ground at Ferrari, having been hired by Luca di Montezemolo – who was ousted by Fiat chairman Sergio Marchionne before Seb joined. Hamilton’s hiring was the pet project of no less an eminence than Ferrari’s executive chairman John Elkann, Marchionne’s successor and scion of the Agnelli dynasty which once owned Fiat and Ferrari. 

There will no doubt be a glittering team launch at Maranello, during which the inevitable questions will be asked about how Lewis and Charles will work together

While this will afford Lewis a high degree of protection politically, he must still avoid the mistakes both Vettel and Sainz have made. Both those drivers at various times became so focused on beating Leclerc that they imperilled team results. Most recently Sainz’s tussle with Sergio Perez in Baku came close to taking both Ferraris
out of the race. 

In a few months, there will no doubt be a glittering team launch at Maranello, during which the inevitable questions will be asked about how Lewis and Charles will work together. They will reply
with polite bromides about
putting the team first. 

And then, on or before race one, the gloves will come off. 

All eyes will be on Hamilton and Leclerc to see if they become friends or foes as Ferrari team-mates

Photo by: Mark Sutton