Why Hamilton’s return to form is not straightforward

“You go to a team with a car you don’t like, you seem like a one-armed man. You go to a team with a car to your liking and you seem like a god.” These were the words of Carlos Sainz after Lewis Hamilton claimed his maiden Ferrari grand prix victory at Barcelona this season, adding to the sprint win he registered in China last year.

Sainz, who was dropped by Ferrari to make way for Hamilton in 2025, was expressing a fundamental truth of grand prix racing. For several seasons now there have been those, including Hamilton himself, who have expressed the belief that he has lost the magic that earned him seven world championships.

The more extreme variant of this position holds it that, as he moves into his forties, Hamilton has been clinging on to an increasingly distant hope that he can correct the perceived injustice of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. During this event, still an historic scab it is inadvisable to pick, Hamilton would likely have won the race – and a record eighth world championship – if the rules governing the safety car procedure had been correctly applied.

Instead, the FIA race director Michael Masi in effect fudged the rules to ensure a finish under racing conditions rather than behind the safety car. Max Verstappen, on freshly fitted tyres, made short work of Hamilton to win the race and the drivers’ title.

In the four seasons following that, Hamilton appeared for the most part to be a spent competitive force, even after engineering a high-profile transfer to Ferrari for the 2025 season. Let’s not forget that his motivations for doing this sprung from Mercedes offering him a contractual term shorter than he felt he deserved; to him, it was as if his own team was losing faith in his ability to weather the rigours of age.

The ground-effect cars of 2022-25 were fundamentally unsuited to Hamilton’s style of late, super-hard braking, and development made the problems worse rather than better. Hamilton’s achievements flow from his uncanny ability to brake to the absolute limit, then ‘read’ how much grip the front tyres regain once released from braking duties so he can use that lateral grip to help rotate the car at the turn-in point.

It’s an unconscious process which occupies milliseconds, but the results are visible on the stopwatch – especially on circuits where slow corners predominate.

Hamilton had built successive generations of Mercedes cars around his fundamental requirements. Ground effect then cancelled this out by ushering in a generation of cars with less rake and ever-lower ride heights so the underfloor aerodynamics could be worked harder and be more consistent.

The spectre of Abu Dhabi 2021 lurks… Is there a part of Hamilton’s psyche that feels the need to correct this perceived injustice?

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Running the car lower, with less suspension travel, and anti-dive/lift geometry to keep the floor flat, deadened the feel. This process arguably reached a nadir in 2024 when various teams, including Mercedes, developed ‘souplesse’ front wings with flaps that deflected under load to balance the cars better through high-speed corners.

If you look at Hamilton’s qualifying performances relative to George Russell’s in that period, you’ll observe the gap between them ballooning – in Russell’s favour – after the definitive flexi-wing was applied in Canada, save for fast-corner tracks such as Spa. Hamilton tried to find an escape route through different set-ups, but the need to maintain a consistently low aero platform gave him little room for manoeuvre, and adjusting his driving style to use the throttle to help rotate the car induced slides that spiked the rear tyre temperatures.

Ferrari hadn’t gone down the flexi-wing route but it had long mapped its power units to be more hands-on in the braking effort for optimal electrical charging, and to induce a fraction of ‘handbrake effect’ to benefit cornering rotation. It was all Hamilton’s new team-mate Charles Leclerc had ever known at F1 level, but Lewis couldn’t live with it: he didn’t need or want the power unit to be doing his left foot’s job for him. All that eventuated was instability.

By the end of the 2025 season, Hamilton was even more despondent and self-doubting than he had been in his final year at Mercedes. As early as August in Hungary, where Leclerc had qualified on pole, while he missed Q3 and ended up 12th on the grid, Hamilton said, “I am useless. Absolutely useless.” Asked what the team could do, he responded, “they probably need to change the driver”.

Ferrari’s SF-26, through aerodynamics and suspension geometry, has proved super-able through slow corners – to the extent that it remains so as we enter the final phase of the season, despite other teams adding performance to their own cars

Come Abu Dhabi, he publicly resolved to leave his phone switched off over the off-season and wash the year right out of his hair.

The second coming

Given a whole new set of technical regulations in 2026, Hamilton has appeared a man reborn – mostly. Narrower and slightly lighter cars shorn of the requirement to make all of their downforce through the underfloor have proved flightier, in combination with narrower wheels and tyres. Ride heights have become less extreme, suspension more pliable.

Ferrari’s SF-26, through aerodynamics and suspension geometry, has proved super-able through slow corners – to the extent that it remains so as we enter the final phase of the season, despite other teams adding performance to their own cars. Regardless of the fundamentally misconceived nature of the engine regulations, this has given Hamilton a platform to exploit his abilities once more.

A less heralded change has been occurring behind the scenes. Hamilton has frequently referred to pushing the team to do more for him, and to absorb lessons he can transfer from previous teams. He has admitted to sending memos to all layers of Ferrari’s management detailing areas he thought could be improved.

Sprint victory at Shanghai last year proved a false dawn. Self-doubt set in and Hamilton couldn’t wait to put the season behind him

Photo by: Bryn Lennon - Formula 1

Crucially, team boss Fred Vasseur has supported him through this process, even shifting (partially) away from long-standing brake partner Brembo so Hamilton can have his preferred choice of Carbone Industrie discs and pads.

It’s understood this was politically sensitive and has damaged some relations, even though a compromise was reached through retaining the Brembo master cylinders and calipers. But the CI brakes offer more powerful peak stopping power at the expense of reaching that peak less progressively, and supplying less feel as it approaches. Hamilton can live with this thanks to his own finely tuned instincts, giving him a small but significant advantage.

It may not work for other drivers, but Leclerc was so discombobulated by Hamilton’s resurgence earlier this season that he swapped to CI discs and pads from Barcelona onwards. Leclerc blaming his brakes for his late-race shunt in Monaco had dealt a further blow to relations with Brembo.

Throughout the early phase of the 2026 season, Hamilton and Leclerc were far more closely matched, often finding themselves scrapping for the same patch of asphalt – with Hamilton often but not always coming out on top. This has made for some tense moments, typically when the drivers encounter one another while on different strategies.

At Barcelona, for instance, Leclerc started 10th after crashing in qualifying, and had to move over for Hamilton in the race after Ferrari swapped Lewis to the three-stop strategy that ultimately enabled him to win. “After a year like last year, there were definitely moments that I was like, ‘sheesh, maybe it is true that when you get to a certain point, you lose it’,” said Hamilton afterwards.

At that point he had already overtaken George Russell for second place in the drivers’ championship, albeit 41 points down on Russell’s team-mate Kimi Antonelli. Leclerc was 40 points behind Hamilton and seeming to struggle. Still, since neither McLaren nor Red Bull seemed to have a car capable of regularly challenging the dominant Mercedes at this point, Hamilton seemed the most likely championship challenger.

Hamilton has found the current technical era far more to his liking; victory at Barcelona is the high point so far

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

The fallout

At the time of writing, just after the Singapore GP, Hamilton had finished on a GP podium just twice since winning at Barcelona, and there have been a number of missed opportunities. Some of them have been of his own making, some he has applied to the team.

In the Dutch GP, Hamilton caused ructions within the team after venting his frustrations on the radio when he came up behind Leclerc on track while running on fresher tyres, since the cars were on offset strategies. Hamilton has often been tetchy with engineers over the radio but rarely does he shout as he did at Zandvoort.

It appeared that Ferrari, after some delay – provoking Hamilton’s ire – ordered Leclerc to pit to get him out of the way, only for Leclerc to refuse. The challenge in parsing this is that the audience hears the radio on a delay, and F1 has recently developed a habit or presenting it in a way that emphasises potential drama.

Team boss Vasseur sought to frame it that the order to delay Leclerc’s pitstop came from the team because it was concerned he would emerge in traffic, and that it wanted Hamilton to push less hard because of the possibility of running him to the end of the race.

“When I was at Mercedes, we had a written rule of engagement. We never really had it too bad. Here there are no rules” Lewis Hamilton

Lewis felt this cost him the chance of a podium, and he returned to the well of team indiscipline at the following race, at Monza, where Leclerc nudged him into the gravel on the opening lap. “When I was at Mercedes, we had a written rule of engagement,” he said afterwards. “We never really had it too bad. Maybe with me and Nico [Rosberg] a couple of times. Here there are no rules.”

More recently, in Malaysia, Hamilton questioned team decisions again, on the grounds that he could have won the relocated Bahrain GP from his second-place grid spot if he had started on intermediate rather than slick tyres. This is a challenging claim to substantiate, since at no point were he and winner Max Verstappen on the same type of tyre at the same stage of its life.

There have also been moments during the season where Hamilton has been less sharp and observant than he used to be, with a habit of getting in the way of drivers who are on push laps during practice and qualifying. Some of this can be laid at the door of his team failing to keep him informed, but Hamilton has pronounced himself more than happy with race engineer Carlo Santi.

Hamilton has said that a different team call could have won him the relocated Bahrain GP

Photo by: Bryn Lennon / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Who’s the leader of the pack?

For any figure, no matter how ambitious and able, coming in to Ferrari presents long-standing historic challenges. This is a very Italian organisation, one cut from the cloth of its late founder, the self-described “agitator of men”.

Enzo Ferrari sponsored an atmosphere of creative tension and, as he withdrew from frontline racing management in middle age, he began to relish his role as the spider in the centre of the web. While it’s frequently claimed that grief after the death of his son Dino drove him away from the race track, in truth he had long since embedded himself in an office role, relying on reports from lieutenants. Naturally, an atmosphere of petty intrigues resulted.

Vasseur is the latest outsider tasked with running the team. One of his predecessors, Jean Todt, orchestrated six consecutive constructors’ championships at the turn of the millennium, by successfully firewalling the technical organisation from outside pressures – chiefly the Italian media and the Fiat Group suits.

His technical director, Ross Brawn, promoted a collaborative and creative atmosphere within a no-blame culture. After this group went their separate ways in the mid-2000s, the Machiavellian machinations of long-standing habit returned. As a result, Ferrari is soon to mark the 20th anniversary of its last world championship.

Hamilton insists Vasseur “really is the guy to take this team in the right direction”, but destabilising rumours continue to circulate around him. In the years since the Todt era, Ferrari has been spun off from the main Fiat Group – now merged into the larger Stellantis empire – and floated as a separate entity, though they do share some management, including executive chairman John Elkann, who is also the chairman of Stellantis. Elkann is the grandson of Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, who was president of Fiat when it acquired Ferrari in 1966.

The modern Ferrari company is run more on corporate lines, which is problematic for the race team since corporations are the antithesis of an effective racing organisation, which thrives on agility, short reporting lines, innovation and accountability. Corporations have more layers of management, move more slowly, and tend to hire and fire arbitrarily.

A year ago, rumours about Vasseur’s future were quashed by him signing a new contract. Recent speculation has surrounded his potential replacement by former Red Bull team principal Christian Horner (see page 42), and fizzed with such intensity that Elkann and CEO Benedetto Vigna felt they had to extinguish it by releasing a statement saying Vasseur enjoyed their full backing.

You don’t have to dial back very far through history to find Elkann saying he had “great faith” in Vasseur’s predecessor Mattia Binotto in the run-up to the 2022 Italian GP. Binotto was out a couple of months later. “I think Fred has the full backing [of senior management],” Hamilton said ahead of the recent grand prix in Malaysia. “You can see they’ve obviously switched out lots of different people in Fred’s role but Fred is a fantastic leader. He really is the guy to take this team in the right direction.”

Clash with Leclerc at Monza highlighted Hamilton’s gripe about lack of properly managed rules of engagement at Ferrari

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Vasseur’s reign has featured repeated speculation about his position, along with friction with the media as he defends his personnel from attack. He is, in effect, trying to do what Todt did but with less overt support from those immediately above him, and with more intrusive scrutiny given that F1 now observes a 24-hour news cycle.

“There are also people above Fred and it’s not about one person,” Hamilton said. “Fred has led the team. He’s helped make changes in this past year. He’s helped us get to second in the constructors’ championship. That’s a huge step from last year.

“For me, it’s frustrating to see all the negativity because you see other people making mistakes and no one really says too much about them. We either make the same mistake or are not perfect and we know we’re not. It’s 10 times worse for some reason for Ferrari. But that’s also to be expected given that it’s the best brand here, it’s the most iconic by far.”

Hamilton won his seven world championships with two different teams, McLaren under Ron Dennis and Mercedes under Toto Wolff, though the latter was by far the most successful phase of his career. He therefore has a broader perspective of what excellence looks like, and being embedded in a winning culture, than does team-mate Leclerc, who has driven for Ferrari for most of his F1 career.

“For me, it’s frustrating to see all the negativity because you see other people making mistakes and no one really says too much about them. It’s 10 times worse for some reason for Ferrari” Lewis Hamilton

Although Hamilton maintains his public backing for Vasseur, and says he believes in the project, he has also expressed frustrations about operational shortcomings this season and a lack of willingness to impose discipline on the drivers.

Pressed on the matter of what Ferrari can learn from other organisations, Hamilton generally prefers to keep to himself. But reading between the lines of his recent pronouncements, we can build a picture: at Mercedes, Wolff enjoys a more robust position because he is a major shareholder in the business, whereas Vasseur is an employee who has more limited agency in pushing through major organisational changes.

“There is a structure that’s been there for some time, whether or not that needs looking at moving forward,” Hamilton said. “There are changes that I would make, but I’m not going to talk about what those are. Toto is in a different position to Fred and the structure’s a lot different. So, that’s all I can say on it, really.”

Regardless, Hamilton has already fulfilled the required results in his contract to trigger an extension taking him until the end of next season. He obviously regards Vasseur as the manager most likely to put Ferrari in a position where he can win that eighth world title. But the more Lewis criticises the team’s missteps in public, the weaker Vasseur’s position becomes…

Hamilton has focused on pushing Ferrari to meet his needs and learn from him; changes to brakes have reaped rewards

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

Is Horner hovering?

A Ferrari perceived to be in competitive crisis, along with a currently unoccupied individual with several world championships to his credit making it known they are available for work, makes for a combustible mixture. And so it came to pass when former Red Bull team principal Christian Horner gave an interview to The Times newspaper to promote his new memoir, Driven.

It’s known that Horner has been keen to return to a leadership role since he was pushed out of the Red Bull organisation in the middle of last season, but that he has a number of prerequisites. One of these would be equity in the organisation. But his comments in the interview were widely interpreted as putting his hand up for Fred Vasseur’s job, should it become available.

“I did 21 years sitting on the pitwall,” Horner was quoted as saying. “I don’t need to go back to that. “At this stage in my life, there’s only one team for which I would accept non-participation in ownership. Would I consider Ferrari? I mean, Ferrari is the biggest brand in Formula 1. It’s the dream. And arguably it’s the sleeping giant of Formula 1.”

It’s understood that Horner felt he was misquoted by the piece in The Times and that many of his responses were taken out of context – that he was merely showing polite respect to Ferrari’s position in F1. In his memoir he relates an anecdote in which former F1 ‘ringmaster’ Bernie Ecclestone says to a gathering of team principals, “Ferrari are the Rolling Stones. You lot are just the supporting acts.”

Nevertheless, against a background of the perception of Ferrari underperforming despite being second in the constructors’ championship, the interview triggered a further bout of speculation. Such is the way at a point in the season where the majority of the driver contracts for the following year are resolved, peace reigns between the stakeholders, so there is little other scuttlebutt on which to report.

“We are not working in perfect serenity, if that is the question,” Vasseur said in Azerbaijan when asked about the effects on his team of such talk. “For me, first, but for everybody on the team, for the media, for 50% of the questions about this, I think it’s a bit of a frustrating situation.

“Mr Horner is looking for a job – that everybody knows – everywhere.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the November 2026 issue and subscribe today.