Fred Vasseur believes he knows the main reason why Lewis Hamilton has been struggling during his first season with Ferrari, and he draws a comparison with former Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz.
It has now been a year since Lewis Hamilton shocked the Formula 1 world by announcing his move to Ferrari, replacing Carlos Sainz in the team’s driver line-up. The arrival of the seven-time world champion generated a wave of excitement and raised expectations that the Scuderia would finally be able to challenge for the World Championship in 2025.
The reality, however, has turned out to be very different. Ferrari’s SF-25 has proved to be a car that is not competitive enough to consistently fight at the very front, and both Hamilton and his teammate Charles Leclerc have been forced to deal with its limitations. Despite the Italian team holding second place in the Constructors’ standings, the gap to the runaway leaders McLaren is already more than 200 points – a margin that highlights how dominant the Woking-based squad has been this season.
While Charles Leclerc has managed, at least on some weekends, to adapt to the unpredictable handling of the Ferrari, Lewis Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur explains why Lewis Hamilton is struggling in his first season with the Scuderia, comparing his adaptation to that of Carlos Sainz. Lewis Hamilton has found it far more difficult. Fred Vasseur, in a long interview with AMuS, offered his own view on why Hamilton has endured such a challenging first half of the season.
“It is mainly because of the circumstances; Lewis has often been unlucky recently,” Fred Vasseur explained. “In Budapest he finished Q1 before Charles and then had to fight in Q2 for a long time. He was just 15 thousandths of a second away from progressing. In the end, one of our drivers was first and the other was twelfth. It looks stupid, of course. But he was not far off, and we could easily have ended up eleventh and twelfth with both of our drivers.”
The Frenchman admitted that he had been hoping for a much smoother start to Hamilton’s Ferrari career. On both sides, he said, there had been an element of “underestimating the change” and the adaptation process to “a very different environment.” Fred Vasseur expanded on this by reminding that Hamilton had been “with the same team for 18 years, McLaren and Mercedes were his home. It was an English team and the motorsport environment always remained the same. When Lewis arrived at Ferrari, we naively thought he would have everything under control.”
Fred Vasseur then drew a comparison with Carlos Sainz, pointing out that the Spaniard’s career trajectory had better prepared him for constant change. “It is not like Carlos Sainz, who changes teams every few years and was familiar with this process. For Lewis, it took four or five races to regain control of the situation. From the Canadian Grand Prix onwards, he has really been back on track,” the Ferrari boss concluded.
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