How Hamilton's dream Ferrari move became a nightmare in 2025

The great engineer Dr Harvey Postlethwaite used to tell people that, when working at Ferrari during the 1980s, he evolved a coping strategy for the inevitable, tawdry and tedious internal politics of Maranello. He wrote his (generous) salary down on a piece of paper, which he kept in his top drawer. When the Machiavellian machinations reached his limit of tolerance, all he had to do was open the drawer to remind himself why he still clocked in every day.

Lewis Hamilton, also paid well for services rendered, might do well to develop something similar, for his honeymoon period is definitively over after an almost uniformly wretched maiden season in rosso corsa. The car, despite protestations from management to the contrary, has not been good, and neither Hamilton nor the tifosi are wearing the disappointments well. The same could be said for those who sign the cheques.

After pretty much every track session in 2025, Hamilton resembled, to quote PG Wodehouse, a man who has gone searching for the leak in life’s gas pipe with a lighted candle. Those who gather in the TV and written-media ‘pen’ for group interviews with the drivers speculate about how little time Hamilton’s attendance will occupy, and how sparsely populated his sentences will be with actual words.

They say it’s the expectation that kills you. Hamilton’s move to Ferrari was announced in February 2024, just months after he signed a contract extension with Mercedes. It was understood that he was looking for more of a long-term commitment than team boss Toto Wolff was willing to give (a so-called ‘one plus one’ deal), and Ferrari offered a solid two years plus options to continue. Even though he would be turning 40 before he drove a Ferrari Formula 1 car for the first time, the competitive rage still burned within him – or so he felt at the time.

Style over substance?

So the F1 world had to wait almost a year before he punched in at Ferrari, and he turned up in style. Hamilton has always known how to make an entrance, arriving in the paddock clad in distinctive casual garb, but for his first public appearance in Maranello he – with the assistance of stylist Eric McNeal – embraced classic Italian style: vintage black pinstripe double-breasted suit and tie with a white shirt, wrapped in a double-breasted Ferragamo overcoat, and set off with red-soled Louboutin shoes. Posing with a Ferrari F40, he set fans and style writers swooning equally.

More or less it has been all downhill from there. Hamilton laboured to 10th place from eighth on the grid in the opening round in Australia. Despite hopes that this result would be an outlier owing to the mixed conditions on race day, further rounds developed the theme of vexatious underperformance. It wasn’t supposed to pan out this way. Ferrari had won five grands prix over the course of the 2024 season and, most tantalisingly, had developed its car into arguably the fastest on the grid in the final rounds. There was every reason to expect Hamilton and team-mate Charles Leclerc to be armed with one of the most competitive cars.

Hamilton's arrival at Ferrari was manufactured with Italian style

Photo by: Ferrari

Over the winter, all four leading constructors put massive resource into their ‘out of the box’ cars for 2025, knowing that sooner or later this season they would have to pivot fully towards the new ruleset coming in 2026. Given that 2 January was the earliest they were permitted to start on aerodynamic development for their 2026 cars, the onus was on getting it right first time and then vacating the wind tunnel as soon as possible.

Ferrari’s SF-25 was an aggressive development of its predecessor, but it came with a key flaw baked into its operating characteristics: in real-world conditions it couldn’t run at the low ride heights for which the floor and suspension were optimised. As a result, Ferrari went backwards in relation to its rivals, especially McLaren, which made a significant leap in the way it could run its car, so the rear ride height was slightly less critical to overall performance. McLaren’s set-up also enabled its MCL39 to be gentler on its rear tyres, benefiting race performance.

It took Red Bull most of the season to understand what McLaren was doing and adapt to it, having spent the first half of the year sowing absurd rumours of technical skulduggery involving water-cooled tyres and phase-changing materials in the brake duct. Ferrari and Mercedes never got there, despite evaluating new rear suspension geometry during the season.

Hamilton has been vocal about the car’s shortcomings, and admitted to firing multi-page memos at senior staff to detail suggested improvements, but it seems Ferrari is slumping into its old ways of blaming the drivers for underperformance rather than sorting the car

So it would have been a disappointing season for Hamilton even if he had not then struggled to match Leclerc. Delicious as the match-up between seven-time champion and Ferrari’s hungry wonderkid seemed, the auguries were not good considering Leclerc’s muscle-memory with the team’s long-term car characteristics.

The (ride) height of the matter

Another elephant occupied the room. Throughout F1’s new ground-effect era, Hamilton had made increasingly heavy weather of conducting his Mercedes quickly relative to team-mate George Russell. Those who do not count themselves among the vast number of Hamilton fans put this down to him being past it, but the reasons were more subtle and technical than that.

Hamilton built his career on a supreme feel for managing car pitch under braking, exquisitely transacting that phase between putting the front wheels under maximum load and rotating the car while releasing the brakes, exploiting the weight transfer to help the unloaded rear turn the car quickly, maintaining a neutral balance throughout. The ground-effect generation of cars have been heavy and stiffly suspended, offering nowhere near the level of feedback he needs to judge that weight transfer. Since most of the negative pressure in the underfloor is generated behind the driver, these cars would be inherently understeery even if they weren’t almost as heavy as an old-style Le Mans prototype. And it has only got worse, season on season, as the cars have evolved around anti-dive geometry to limit rear ride-height changes that would leak downforce.

Hamilton never really gelled with his first Ferrari F1 car, but the new rules era will provide a reset

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

So, while you could choose to read Hamilton’s glide path from Russell in terms of qualifying pace during the Mercedes years as evidence of him being past it, the reality is more grounded in technicalities. Especially since Hamilton’s average deficit to Russell sharply increased after the 2024 Canadian Grand Prix. This is highly likely to be connected to Mercedes’ adoption of a new aero-elastic front wing geometry from Monaco onwards in an attempt to improve balance. In its previous form the wing had tended to generate too much downforce at high speeds as the car compressed under load, then release it sharply as the car slowed, and the result was chronic understeer in slow corners. With the new wing Mercedes could run the rear end lower, resulting in less dive under braking, but further sapping Hamilton’s feel for weight transfer.

In theory, tighter controls on flexi-wings brought in from the 2025 Spanish GP onwards should have negated some of this, but the problems Hamilton has faced since joining Ferrari overlap rather than being identical. From the off, his muscle-memory for the braking characteristics of hybrid power units – where the normal braking effect of pad on disc combines with the actions of energy recovery on the rear axle – has been thrown by Ferrari’s very different engine-braking behaviour.

On top of that, the SF-25 has a very narrow optimal set-up window that requires an ultra-low ride height – sometimes too low, as Hamilton was to discover in China. There, having won the sprint race from pole position, and then contrived to clash with his team-mate at the beginning of the grand prix, Hamilton finished sixth but was disqualified for excessive skid plate wear – a sure sign of the rear ride height being too low. Raising the car to avoid this has cost downforce and Ferrari hasn’t offered much of a threat to the leaders since, despite trying a new rear suspension. Hamilton’s tendency to be up to three tenths off Leclerc in qualifying has been very costly in an era of performance convergence where such a gap can cost an armful of grid positions.

Shanghai is a fast circuit with relatively few slow corners, so Hamilton’s pace there was more indicative of his natural gifts – as was Silverstone, where he outqualified and finished ahead of Leclerc. But in the final rounds he slumped and was left reaching for answers, out in Q1 in successive weeks at Las Vegas and Losail.

Hamilton has been vocal about the car’s shortcomings, and admitted to firing multi-page memos at senior staff to detail suggested improvements, but it seems Ferrari is slumping into its old ways of blaming the drivers for underperformance rather than sorting the car. After both drivers were eliminated from the Sao Paulo GP, chairman John Elkann gave a speech in which he heaped praise on Ferrari’s World Endurance Championship programme, and the F1 engineers, but suggested “we have drivers who need to focus on driving and talk less”.

Someone in Elkann’s position really ought to know that the WEC programme consists of a car built by Dallara being run by a private team (AF Corse), so perhaps he should talk less and focus on his spreadsheets. If, as team boss Frederic Vasseur says, Ferrari in effect looked at McLaren’s performance and abandoned 2025 development in April, Hamilton and Leclerc have been treading water at best throughout the season. Little wonder that in the final races, Hamilton bore the countenance of one who is anxious to put 2025 well behind him.

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Can Hamilton put his tough start at Ferrari behind him in F1's new era?

Photo by: Ahmad AlShehab / NurPhoto via Getty Images