Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Albert Park, 2026

Lewis Hamilton is hopeful Ferrari can close the gap to Mercedes despite being surprised by the scale of their advantage in qualifying last weekend.

The Mercedes drivers locked out the front row of the grid while the leading Ferrari, Hamilton’s team mate Charles Leclerc, was 0.809 seconds slower in fourth place. Hamilton, who suffered a power unit problem in qualifying, was almost a second off pole-winner George Russell’s time.

“We knew that Mercedes were looking very strong, and little did we know it was as big as the gap that we saw,” he said. “But it’s not an impossible gap to close.

“It’s just going to take all hands on deck. I’m confident my team are doing absolutely everything back at the factory to try and close that gap.”

Hamilton narrowly failed to score his first podium finish for Ferrari but showed strong pace in the race, especially after switching to the hard tyres. He said the team has gained useful knowledge about the performance of their car compared to Mercedes’.

“I had a lot of fun last week,” he said. “Also to have extra testing was fun for us because normally it’s only a day and a half in the car or something like that before the first race. So [it was useful] to get more running and then a lot [more was] discovered through the race from start to end.”

Although Hamilton won the sprint race in Shanghai last year, it proved Ferrari’s only victory in any type of race that season. He said it’s “far too early to say” whether they might be able to challenge for a win in either race this weekend.

“We were eight tenths behind in qualifying in the last race. We haven’t added eight tenths of performance to the car in four days.

“So I think that it will still be very tough to beat the Mercedes this weekend. You also have to assume that the others are going to be picking up pace, like McLaren and the second Red Bull being in the fight as well. I think we’ll just focus on doing the best job we can and extracting the most from the car.”

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Keith Collantine

Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 – when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring journalist, Keith began running the site full-time in 2010, achieving a long-held ambition to dedicate his full attention to his passion for motor racing. View all posts by Keith Collantine