Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur says he has no doubt Lewis Hamilton is as competitive as he’s ever been, as he joins the team for his 19th season in Formula 1.
The seven-times world champion turned 40 last month and is now the second-oldest driver on the grid. He ended a two-and-a-half year winning drought last season, but placed behind team mate George Russell in the championship.
However Vasseur brushed off concerns that Hamilton’s form has dipped since his last world championship win in 2020.
“I think he showed in Abu Dhabi, starting from the back and coming back to P4, overtaking Russell in the last lap, the pace is there,” Vasseur told media including RaceFans during Ferrari’s launch event today. “And I had no doubt before.”
Hamilton previously drove for Vasseur in 2006, when he won the GP2 (now Formula 2) title. Vasseur said the much-changed driver makes an ideal combination with Charles Leclerc, who also drove for him in F1’s junior series.
“He’s 20 years older than when we were together,” said Vasseur. “Everybody is changing, moving, developing. For sure he is much more mature, much more experienced.
“He’s the perfect fit with the team today. That’s exactly what I was looking for, for the team, for me, for Charles, I think it’s the perfect combination.”
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Vasseur believes combining two of F1’s top drivers will pay off for the team as both will learn from the other – as he says Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jnr did last year.
“It’s always an opportunity and one of the skills of the drivers is trying to always improve,” he said. “And a good way to improve is to [observe] the experience and the performance of your team mate, because it’s the driver who is the closest to you. You have access to the [lap time] deltas that you can work with and if you are clever that you can do a step with the potential of your team mate.
“I’m fully, fully sure I’m right because we already did two TPCs [testing of past cars] and a shakedown today [and saw] that it will be the case. And honestly I’m not scared at all with this because we need to have this kind of evolution.
“I spoke about it last year between Charles and Carlos, it was already the case. As a team, if we want to perform, we need to have two drivers performing. We need to have two drivers in a kind of competition, a positive competition and a positive evolution. And I’m sure that will be the case.”
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