Lewis Hamilton says it’s too soon to think about mounting a championship after scoring his first victory for Ferrari.

The seven-times world champion has not fought for a title since he narrowly and controversially missed out a record-breaking eighth crown in 2021. He has made his best start to a season since then and lies second in the standings, 41 points behind leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who took his place at Mercedes last year.

But Hamilton isn’t paying attention to the championship situation yet. “With the way that the year started out, I have not really been thinking about it like that,” he said. “I’ve not been thinking about an eighth.

“Of course, what we had worked towards has been being able to win, but I’ve always been conscious of the fact that it takes time. Mercedes have come out of the gates with a blistering car and blistering pace, both drivers doing such a great job. We know we have this power deficit. There’s going to be tracks where we go to with long, long straights where that makes it even harder.”

Although his upgraded Ferrari looked more competitive than ever in Spain, he took the lead thanks to a fortuitously-timed Virtual Safety Car period. Hamilton said they need to extract more performance from their car to fight Mercedes.

“We’ve got a great car at the core and if we keep adding performance and we can go through the corners quicker, maybe we can narrow that deficit down a little bit until we improve or until we close the gap on power. It’s very, very hard to think long-term at the moment.”

While Ferrari’s SF-26 has proved more competitive than last year’s car, Hamilton has also gelled well with his new race engineer. Carlos Santi, who took over from Ricardo Adami at the beginning of the year, joined him on the podium after his victory in Catalunya.

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“We didn’t know each other, we’d never spoken,” said Hamilton. “I didn’t know anything about him. We met and got on straight away.

“It’s great to be able to connect with an engineer other than what I used to have. I had it for such a long time and then you kind of lose that feeling because Bono’s [Peter Bonnington] now doing it with Kimi.

“It was really great to be able to share that experience with him on that stage. He’s very quiet. You could tell it’s hard for him to express his emotions. He’s just smiley and I’m giving him these big hugs and pulling him in, saying ‘thank you’. I like to think that this has probably reignited the love that he has as being an engineer as he has done for me as a driver.”

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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