They say every Formula 1 driver dreams of racing for Ferrari.
For most of them Ferrari will remain an unobtainable dream.
But for the select few who are chosen, sometimes Ferrari becomes a nightmare.
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After five mostly painful races dressed in red, Lewis Hamilton must be hoping he’ll wake up from his Ferrari bad dream.
“It was horrible,” he said after his woeful Saudi Arabian Grand Prix drive to seventh, last in class. “It was not enjoyable at all.
“At the moment there’s no fix. This is how it’s going to be for the rest of the year, so it’s pretty painful.”
A masterpiece 12 months in the making was fraying just five races into the season.
Hamilton’s Ferrari move is the biggest driver switch in living memory, the seven-time champion uprooting himself from a lifetime of Mercedes backing to join the most storied team in motorsport.
He was to arrive at Maranello at what seemed like just the right time.
Ferrari came up just 14 points short of the constructors championship last year and ended the campaign with arguably the fastest car in the sport.
Hamilton, having laboured for three seasons in erratic Mercedes cars rarely capable of winning, seemed to have once again nailed the timing of his big career move.
The goodwill couldn’t have been greater. Ferrari’s famous tifosi turned out en masse to watch his first private test at the team’s Maranello circuit in central Italy, previous animosity for their one-time antagonist having long melted away.
When he landed in Australia for his first grand prix, he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.
“This is the most exciting period of my life,” he said on Thursday in Melbourne. “I’m so excited to get in the car tomorrow.”
But it’s been almost all downhill from there.
An excusable 10th place in tricky conditions in Melbourne gave way to a remarkable sprint victory in China, but that by some margin has proved to be the only highlight of the season so far.
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His gap to Leclerc to qualifying has blown out rather than shrunk. He’s so far finished just once in the top 10. He sits solidly seventh in the drivers championship, essentially last in class, behind teenage Mercedes rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
His key performance indicators make for lacklustre reading.
Hamilton’s vital statistics after five rounds
Qualifying result: 7.4 average
Qualifying head to head: 1-4 to Leclerc
Qualifying differential: 2.6 places behind Leclerc
Time differential: 0.282 seconds behind Leclerc
Race result: 7.3 average
Race head to head: 0-4 to Leclerc
Race differential: 2.5 places behind Leclerc
Race time: 13.8 seconds behind Leclerc
Points: 31-47 to Leclerc
It’s no wonder at the end of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the fifth race in a gruelling run of five events in six weekends, that Hamilton cut as downbeat and dejected a figure as he’s been in years.
“There wasn’t one second [when I felt comfortable in the car],” he told Sky Sports. “Clearly the car is capable of being P3. Charles did a great job today. I can’t blame the car.”
He was even more pessimistic speaking to F1 TV when he was asked whether the weekend off would give him a chance to reset and rebuild.
“If you want to look at it positively, yes, but I mean, honestly, I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s not going to make any difference.”
After completing his television rounds with the conclusion that he needed a “brain transplant” to understand the car, he expanded a little to the written press.
“Nothing positive to take from [the race] except for Charles finishing on the podium, which is great for the team,” he said, per Racer.
“It was horrible. It was not enjoyable at all.
“I was just sliding around. First stint, massive understeer, car not turning, and then massive deg, and then the second stint, slightly better balance, but still just no pace. It was pretty bad.”
“I just lacked grip. I lacked good balance. I was just fighting the car every corner, and nothing I did would work.”
‘F**** lovely’ – Max FUMES after penalty | 01:41
WHERE’S IT GOING WRONG?
After qualifying three places and 0.531 seconds behind Leclerc at the weekend, Hamilton said he was “just not gelling with the car”.
It’s concerning given only a few days earlier, on Sunday at the Bahrain Grand Prix, he’d lauded a breakthrough during the middle stint of the race that he said at the time had unlocked a new level of understanding of his car.
There are some things we can interpret as being key to his struggles.
One of the biggest is a confidence-sapping discomfort with his car’s unstable rear end at high speed.
The Jeddah Corniche Circuit sells itself as F1’s fastest street track, with an average speed of 254.6 kilometres per hour. It’s no wonder his struggles were most acute there.
Knife-edge balance is a trait intrinsic to this ground-effect generation of rules, with car performance so sensitive to tiny changes in ride height and attitude.
A driver’s sensitivity and adaptability to those sudden balance changes correlates directly with how capable they are of taking the car to the limit.
Hamilton has described Leclerc’s ability to live with the “really oversteery” Ferrari as “really impressive”.
Hamilton has mentioned other problems too, like his gradual adaptation to Ferrari’s Brembo-brand brakes after years working with Carbon Industrie material and, as a related issue, the engine braking characteristics of the Ferrari power unit.
Both are crucial to a driver whose style is built on hard, aggressive braking and precise turning inputs.
Problematic for Hamilton is that these are baked-in problems. The car’s aerodynamic platform is set for the year. The brake supplier is locked in. Engine development is frozen.
It’s why he’s transitioned from believing he could bring the car towards his driving style to instead attempting to adapt to the car’s demands.
“[Leclerc] has been driving this car for a long time, so he definitely knows it pretty well,” Hamilton continued. “There’s plenty in the data, for sure. Honestly, it doesn’t look massively different in the data, just that you’re slower through the corners.
“I think I will struggle with this in Miami. I don’t know how long I’ll struggle for, but it’s definitely painful.
“At the moment there’s no fix. This is how it’s going to be for the rest of the year. So it’s pretty painful.
“I don’t anticipate [a solution], but we do have slightly different set-ups. We’ll have to look and see whether that set-up is the way the car likes to be set. Him and his side are definitely also doing a good job of it.”
Max silent in cooldown after Oscar’s win | 01:24
VASSER BACKS CHAMP TO REBOUND
Unsurprisingly team principal Frédéric Vasseur, integral to bringing Hamilton to the team, has come out swinging in defence of the Briton, insisting that there was no cause for alarm so early in the season.
“I will be 2000 per cent behind him and I will give him support,” he said, per Sky Sports. “We will start from tomorrow morning to try to find solutions.
“But honestly I am not too worried. If you have a look at what he did in China or what he did in the race in Bahrain last week or even in the first part of the session this weekend, the potential is there for sure.
“We just have to adjust the balance because we are collectively, Lewis and us, struggling with the balance of his car and [how] he is working the tyres.
“It’s a kind of negative spot, but I think the potential of the car is there and we will try to solve that.”
Intriguingly the usually jovial team boss was prodded by one journalist into a “snap” back over a question about Hamilton’s “dramatically” declining form over five rounds, per Sky Sports reportage.
“It’s not ‘dramatically’,” Vasseur said. “We did five races so far. I know that you want to have the big headlines tomorrow that ‘Fred said this’, but this is f***ing bull****.
“At the end of the day we are in competition. You have ups and downs.
“When we have ups we are not world champions. When we have downs we are not nowhere. It’s just a competition.”
Instead he suggested the fine margins at the front of the field meant even relatively small swings in form could have big consequences for results.
“You have 10 cars and a couple of tenths,” he said. “Have a look at Max — he won in Japan, he finished 30 seconds behind [Oscar] Piastri in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia he was P2 and had pole position. We just have to stay calm.
“I think it paid off last year to do hundredths of seconds and hundredths of seconds, and we need to keep the same approach.
“I will never be the guy who says we are world champions or we are nowhere. We are a team. We are struggling on the weekend, we have good results on the weekend. It’s just that we have to improve step by step and stay calm.”
It’s fair enough to take the position that the Ferrari car remains the season’s primary problem, not the underperformance of one of its drivers.
Leclerc said on Sunday that he and the team had executed the “perfect” race, but that was an acknowledgment that perfection for Ferrari tops out at third place and just 1.092 seconds ahead of P4 — well short of the team’s championship aspirations.
The argument goes that improving the car will help Hamilton improve his form.
But there are serious questions about whether big enough changes can be made to the car this year to accommodate the seven-time champion.
Piastri outduels Max to win Saudi GP | 03:22
COULD HE JUST WAIT UNTIL NEXT YEAR?
Is it a coincidence that Hamilton’s force has been curtailed with the advent of ground effect?
The peculiar demands of these rules have burnt more than just him. Daniel Ricciardo’s interminable struggles were linked with characteristics of these cars he could never wrap his head around, ending his career.
Sergio Pérez’s career may have also been ended by a Red Bull Racing car sitting at the extreme end of the rules, and Liam Lawson’s reputation has been injured by following in the Mexican’s footsteps.
Even Lando Norris is now having difficulty taking his McLaren car to the limit in qualifying as development reaches a phase of diminishing returns.
“The worst,” Hamilton replied when asked what he thought about this generation of rules.
“With less ground effect [next year], let’s hope things that things shift.
“I don’t know anything about next year’s car, so I’m not spending any time to think about it.”
The Hamilton-Ferrari gamble, originally announced before the 2024 season got underway was always predicated on ultimate success in 2026 under new rules.
But is it really now a matter of sitting and waiting 19 rounds to get to next season?
“It’s not a transitional time,” Vasseur insisted. “For sure he’s down, because when you finish the race in seventh and your teammate is on the podium…
“Honestly I take it as positive that Lewis is down because if he was happy with this, it wouldn’t be normal.
“He’s a racer, he’s a competitor, he wants to get the best from what he has, and for sure he’s disappointed.
“Now we have to work together to react together. It will be the only way to move forward.”
Five races into the season is too early to draw conclusions, but it’s deep enough into the year to being to form trends.
Hamilton still has a steep learning curve ahead of him, and the time frame for success is as uncertain as it as before the season began.
In fact Hamilton’s own words before turning a wheel in Melbourne are instructive as he readies himself for Miami and the long and important European leg of the season.
“I’m back at square one,” he said in March. “I’m under no assumptions that it will be easy. It is not.
“Inevitably there is a transition period and there is a foundation that’s needed to be built.
“The first half of the season really is that foundation building — those relationships, the trust you’re building with absolutely every single person within the team that you get to work in.
“Whilst respect is given, trust is something that’s built over time.”
For now success at Ferrari remains a distant dream.