There is a stark contrast in morale between the two sides of the Ferrari garage. Charles Leclerc arrives at the sixth round of the championship after the strong performance in Jeddah, which earned the Maranello team its first podium of the season. The Monegasque, despite the challenges plaguing the SF-25, has found an alternative solution to extract the maximum potential from the car while waiting for the updates to make the car more competitive.
Lewis Hamilton arrives in Miami with a very different spirit. More than the lackluster results and the few points collected in the first five Grands Prix of the season, the real concern is the failure to find a compromise setup that can enhance Lewis Hamilton’s driving style. The weekend in Saudi Arabia was emblematic in this sense, marked by a “performance depression.”
While in the first four rounds of the season, the Briton showed flashes of competitiveness even within the same race, on the ultra-fast Jeddah track he was soundly beaten by his teammate. The feeling is that the seven-time Formula 1 world champion has not been able to find a solid baseline. A consistent platform on which to adjust the SF-25’s setup to suit both the driver’s needs and the track characteristics.
It’s a déjà vu of what happened at Mercedes when ground-effect cars returned. On many weekends, the engineers assigned to Lewis Hamilton’s Silver Arrow operated through trial and error instead of developing the setup from a basic configuration. Jeddah is a revealing track in this respect. Lewis Hamilton was the pole-sitter and winner of the inaugural GP edition there, after one of his many all-out battles with Max Verstappen.
The following year, the first with the current technical regulations, he was sensationally eliminated in Q1. At the time, the talk was of a setup that made the Mercedes W13 undriveable. On several occasions over the past three years, the British driver has raced in no man’s land. If with a new team he still faces the same difficulties he already experienced, it’s fair to ask some questions—perhaps unpopular, but at the same time plausible.
In the ground-effect era, Lewis Hamilton has never driven the best car on the grid, except in particular circumstances, such as Las Vegas or Spa-Francorchamps last season. In hindsight, his teammates, namely George Russell and Charles Leclerc, despite the poor competitiveness of the cars, have shown better performance than the Stevenage-born driver.
Four years into stable regulations, we wonder if this generation of cars is truly incompatible with Lewis’s driving style. A discomfort known at Brackley, as explained by Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director. The Englishman’s driving style has always been characterized by heavy braking followed by sharp cornering, a technique known as “V-ing.”
Current cars don’t enhance this approach, as they are heavy and prone to understeer. This makes it impossible to carry maximum speed through the apex. When the car allowed it, he managed to compensate with his talent for the difficulty in optimizing his strength. On the contrary, with more difficult cars, the handicap has become too disruptive to overall performance.
In this context, the work of the Maranello engineers and technicians is understandably tough, as there are many factors to consider in defining the setup. First, they must establish a platform suited to the circuit’s characteristics. On track, the setup must be refined to address the current issues of the 677 project, and finally, compromises must be found to make the car more comfortable for Lewis Hamilton to drive.
In the second Sprint Race of the 2025 Formula 1 season, we’ll see how far the mutual understanding between Ferrari and the British champion has come. Hopefully, the process will be quick enough not to waste what, at least in theory, was supposed to mark the rebirth of the seven-time F1 world champion. We await the next two days on track to learn more.
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