Lewis Hamilton in trouble at Ferrari: “I’m used to it, really”

A year ago, we saw a different Lewis Hamilton: a racing driver who was dissatisfied with himself and the world. In his first year with Ferrari, the Englishman did not hold back with his criticism, not even of himself. He doubted whether he still had what it takes; he doubted whether Ferrari was really listening to all his suggestions for improvement; he doubted the approach taken by the Ferrari strategists – repeatedly and, painfully, in public.

The chemistry between Hamilton and his race engineer, Riccardo Adami, wasn’t right; at times, the pair sounded like a bickering married couple: they talk, but they don’t understand each other.

In 2026, many things are fundamentally different: the Briton, now 41, gets on much better with the new generation of racing cars than he did with the winged cars of the past; he has rediscovered his old flair; his speed is at times breathtaking; and he won the Barcelona Grand Prix. And in Carlo Santi, he has found a race engineer whose calm demeanour harmonises perfectly with the seven-time world champion’s fiery spirit.

However, whenever things go wrong, Lewis Hamilton falls back into old habits, as was the case in Baku. When the final practice session for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix came to an end, the record-breaking champion – who is used to success – could only manage 6th on the grid, whilst, of all people, his Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc settled comfortably into P2. Mamma mia!

The 106-time Grand Prix winner Hamilton then grumbled: “But when we went into Q3, they changed the plan. Instead of doing two runs, we had to wait, and as I was ahead of Charles, I had no one in front of me to draft behind. That alone cost us a lot of time.”

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“We’re really struggling to get the tyres to work. It was still quite okay in Q1, but we were already having problems with the rear tyres in Q2.”

“Something’s always going wrong; I’m used to it. We’ve got the second or third fastest car here. And then I don’t know what went wrong with the power supply either.”

“Towards the end, I gave Leclerc a nice slipstream, almost all the way down the full-throttle section back to the start-finish line. I had that slipstream in the third free practice session too, so I know – it was worth six tenths of a second. Unfortunately, I didn’t get one myself in qualifying.”

“I tried desperately to get those stupid tyres into the best working window by zigzagging, just to get through the race in a halfway decent manner. It’s really annoying. I’ve been saying it for years: we need better tyres.”