Lewis Hamilton Reveals Ferrari Breakthrough After Car Finally Feels “Back to What It Used to Be”
· Yahoo Sports
It takes more than ambition to turn a difficult working relationship around inside a Formula 1 team. It takes the right engineers, the right setup philosophy, and sometimes the willingness to stop doing the thing you’ve always done. For Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari, all three appear to have arrived at the same time – and the results showed up where it counts.
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Hamilton produced a brilliant overtake on Max Verstappen to claim second place at the Canadian Grand Prix, his best finish in Ferrari red.
After spending several laps glued to Verstappen’s rear, Hamilton remained patient, applying sustained pressure through the closing stages before sweeping around the outside on lap 62 to complete a decisive and clean pass.
The kind of move that, a few months ago, felt like a distant memory.
After the race, Hamilton overjoyed with this newfound pace and confidence.
“I think I finally have that with the engineers that I got and the setup within the team,” he said. “Much, much happier in the car. It feels more back to what it used to be.” None of it came easily in the race itself – with the driver noting the complexity of managing battery deployment in the new regulations meant every overtake required calculating energy reserves across multiple straights simultaneously, making wheel-to-wheel combat significantly harder than anything he’d experienced before.
A New Prep Approach Transformed the Car
Hamilton believes he has found a new way forward in race preparation at Ferrari, having skipped the team’s simulator ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix and instead spending time working through data with his engineers.
It’s a meaningful departure from the usual routine, and per Hamilton, it paid off almost immediately.
“I was having so much fun out there, and also, the fact that I didn’t do the sim, and I feel it’s the best I felt all year,” he said. “So, I think that’s the way forward for me.”
Hamilton chose a setup that, by his own account, Ferrari had never used before, and described it as having “transformed the car” for him.
Ferrari still lack straight-line speed in Montreal – Hamilton himself admitted after the race that the competition’s power advantage on the straights forced him to claw back whatever he gained through the corners. But the underlying feeling in the car was fundamentally different to anything he’d experienced in his eighteen months at Maranello.
If Hamilton is now consistently more comfortable in the SF-26, Ferrari have a better chance of converting one-car weekends into a double threat at the front.
With Kimi Antonelli winning the race and George Russell retiring, Hamilton’s second place moved him ahead of Lando Norris into fourth in the championship standings.
That’s not title-contention territory yet, but it’s forward progress of a kind that has been frustratingly scarce.
The deeper question is whether Canada was a circuit-specific sweet spot or evidence of something more durable. Hamilton clearly believes it’s the latter. When he says the car feels like it used to, he means it feels manageable, predictable, his. After nearly two seasons of chasing that feeling, he finally sounds like he’s stopped chasing.