Autobayng News Team
Lewis Hamilton has produced extensive documents for Ferrari on how he believes they should improve their car and the wider team.
The seven-times world champion said he has taken the initiative because he does not want to risk failing to win a title at the team as several of his predecessors did.
“I see a huge amount of potential within this team,” said Hamilton. “The passion: nothing comes close to that.
“But it’s a huge organisation, and there are a lot of moving parts. And not all of them are firing on all the cylinders that they need to be. That’s ultimately why the team has not had the success that I think it deserves.
“So I feel that it’s my job to challenge absolutely every area, to challenge everybody in the team. Particularly the guys that are at the top who are making the decisions.
“If you look at the team over the last 20 years, they’ve had amazing drivers: Kimi [Raikkonen]*, Fernando [Alonso], Sebastian [Vettel] – all world champions. However, they didn’t win a world championship [at Ferrari].
“And for me, I refuse for that to be the case with me.”
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Hamilton began compiling his reports after joining them from Mercedes at the beginning of this year. “I’m going the extra mile,” he said.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have had experiences in two other great teams. While things are different because there’s a different culture and everything, I think if you take the same path all the time, you get the same results. So I’m just challenging certain things.”
Ferrari have been “incredibly responsive”, says Hamilton. “We’ve been improving in so many areas – through marketing, through everything we are delivering for sponsors, the way the engineers continue to work. There’s still a lot of improvements to be made, but they’ve been very responsive.
“Ultimately, I’m just trying to create allies within the organisation and get them ‘geed up’, get them pushing. I’m here to win. I don’t have as much time as [Andrea Kimi Antonelli] so it’s crunch time.
“I truly believe in the potential of this team. I really believe they can win multiple world championships moving forward. They already have an amazing legacy. But during my time, that’s my sole goal.”
Having had two weekends without a grand prix since the last round, he used the opportunity to visit the factory and compile more of his thoughts.
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“I was at the factory [in] two weeks, a couple of days each week,” said Hamilton. “We did preparation, naturally going over where we were in the previous race, things that we need to change.
“I hold a lot of meetings, so I’ve called lots of meetings with the heads of the team, so I’ve sat with John [Elkann, president], Benedetto [Vigna, CEO], and Fred [Vasseur, team principal] in several meetings. I’ve sat with the head of our car development, with Loic [Serra, technical director for chassis], also the heads of different departments.
“We’re talking about the engine for next year, talking about front suspension for next year, talking about rear suspension for next year; things that you want, issues that I have with this car.
“I’ve sent documents through the year. After the first few races I did a full document for the team, then during this break I had another two documents that I sent in and so then I come in and want to address those.
“Some of it is structural adjustments that we need to make as a team in order to get better in all the areas that we want to improve. The other one was really about the car, the current issues that I have with this car. Some things you do want to take onto the next year’s car and some that you need to work on changing for next year.”
Hamilton has also begun turning his attention to the new regulations which Formula 1 will introduce next year.
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“I tried the 2026 car for the first time and started work on that,” he said. “Thirty engineers come into the room and you sit and debrief with every single one of them. So there’s a big, big push.
“Otherwise [I was] just training. Maybe a little bit too hard, it was a bit heavy this weekend.”
Ferrari will introduce a suspension upgrade this weekend which it hopes will cure some of the problems it has encountered during its win-less campaign to date.
“We’ll get to test the suspension tomorrow and I’m sure there’s going to be learnings from it,” said Hamilton. “We’ll figure out how to fine-tune it and to try to extract performance from it. On the simulator there’s no difference but I’m sure across different circuits perhaps there’ll be benefits.”
Hamilton admitted he was relieved to see the team bringing some performance upgrades to their car as he feels others have made faster progress.
“For me the positive thing is arriving at the filming day where you see that new bits are coming, you see that we are getting development,” he said. “Because in general, we had an upgraded floor in Bahrain, then it was quite some time before we got another upgrade, I think it was Austria. So pace-wise it wasn’t necessarily to what I would have thought we would have.
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“If you look at some of the other teams, they bring small pieces every single weekend, like Red Bull often do, or Mercedes do for example. These are more like big chunks along the way.
“So I was just really happy to see that there clearly is a big push back at the factory. There are a lot of changes, and then to see the results of those changes takes time.”
*Raikkonen did win a world championship at Ferrari, in 2007
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