According to the former Indian driver, both “The Professor” and Lewis Hamilton struggled to feel fully comfortable at Ferrari, with negative consequences for both drivers. Karun Chandhok has offered his perspective on Hamilton’s difficult spell in red, highlighting similarities with the experience lived by Alain Prost decades earlier.
A first year to forget
The last two seasons of Lewis Hamilton have been the most difficult of the seven-time Formula 1 world champion’s career. After finishing seventh in the 2024 season at the wheel of the Mercedes, a year in which he still managed to secure two victories, the British driver reached the lowest point of his career with Ferrari. Throughout the entire 2025 championship, car number 44 never achieved a pole position or a podium finish, excluding the Sprint race in China, as that format does not count towards official statistics.
At the same time, Lewis Hamilton became the Ferrari driver with the highest number of consecutive races finished without a top-three result, a statistic that underlines the scale of the difficulties he has faced during his first season with the Scuderia.
Obstacles within an Italian team
The challenges have not been limited to adapting to the SF-25, a car that has not been taken to the top step of the podium even by Charles Leclerc. Lewis Hamilton has also had to come to terms with the team environment itself. For the first time since 2007, the year of his Formula 1 debut, Lewis Hamilton has competed in a world championship with a team based outside the United Kingdom.
He has found himself in a completely different environment at Maranello, working with a new race engineer and facing the added challenge of learning a new language. All these elements have contributed to a season marked by adaptation struggles and a lack of results.
Hamilton and Prost
This drastic cultural shift has had a significant negative impact on Hamilton, much like what happened in the past to another multiple world champion such as Alain Prost, who moved from McLaren to Ferrari in 1990. At least, this is the view of Karun Chandhok, who drew a clear parallel between the two situations.
“I think Lewis also underestimated the cultural change,” Karun Chandhok commented on The F1 Show. “I was talking about it with Alain Prost, who came from a British team, and he was someone who always said publicly that he felt more comfortable in British teams, having won all his world championships with those teams. He talked about the cultural change of being at Ferrari, even though it was some time ago now, but he says the culture is very different, and trying to succeed at Ferrari is different compared to any other team.
“That relationship built at Mercedes was very strong, but I think this has been an issue, because he has not yet completely overcome the cultural change of Ferrari.”
The problem Lewis Hamilton is currently experiencing is reminiscent, in part, of the difficulties faced by other drivers who joined Ferrari after winning world titles from the 1990s onwards. With the notable exception of Michael Schumacher, drivers such as Fernando Alonso and, more recently, Sebastian Vettel were unable to add their names to Ferrari’s list of world champions, despite arriving in Maranello from title-winning spells with Renault and Red Bull respectively.
As the 2026 technical revolution approaches, the question remains whether Lewis Hamilton can adapt his mindset and find the “British” style of efficiency within the passionate, often chaotic heart of Italy. History suggests it is a mountain few have successfully climbed, but for a driver of Hamilton’s caliber, the second year will be the true test of his legacy at Maranello.
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