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The shift at Ferrari has been fascinating. Until recently Leclerc has clearly had the upper hand, and Hamilton looked so well beaten that the pundits have been lining up to take easy shots, labelling him a has-been and putting a timeline on his imminent retirement.
While many of the drivers and a substantial portion of the fan base despise the new technical formula, for Hamilton it has been transformative. He much prefers the more communicative nature of the 2026 chassis to the overly stiff, heavy, and often unpredictable products of the recent ground-effect era.
Hamilton has always liked to brake late and hard, turning in later too, taking a cornering trajectory more along the lines of a hard ‘U’ than a soft ‘V’. He has a remarkable feel for how to modulate the brake pedal, not just on application but also on release, to help the car turn.
Throughout the ground-effect era he struggled with a car concept defined by the need to run the chassis as close to the ground as possible to maximise downforce. This dictated stiff suspension with increasingly extreme anti-dive and anti-lift geometries which sapped the feel he thrives on.
Coupled with that, during the first year at Ferrari Hamilton struggled with the abruptness of the engine braking, a characteristic Leclerc was able to manage – even use to help the car turn – because he was more accustomed to it. Among the low points of the year was the Hungarian GP, where Leclerc qualified on pole and Hamilton didn’t even make the top 10. "The team has no problem – you've seen the car's on pole,” said Hamilton afterwards. "So we probably need to change driver."
Against this background, though, Hamilton was seeking change within the organisation – importantly, with the full support of team principal Frederic Vasseur. During the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, ahead of the summer break, he alluded to the sheer volume of documents he had been compiling and sending to senior management.
“I held a lot of meetings,” he said. “I’ve called on lots of meetings with the heads of the team, so I’ve called on John [Elkann, executive chairman], Benedetto [Vigna, CEO] and Fred in several meetings. I’ve sat with the head of our car development, Loïc [Serra], also the heads of different departments, talking about engines for next year and about front suspension for next year, rear suspension – things that you want, issues that I have with this car.
“So I’ve sent documents, done through the year. After the first few races I did a full document for the team, then during this break I did another two documents. Some of it is structural adjustments we need to make as a team in order to get better in all the areas we want to improve.
“The other was about the current issues I have with this car. There are some things you do want to take onto next year’s car and some you need to work on changing. I tried the ’26 car for the first time [in the sim] and started work on that, and the engineers come into the room and you sit and debrief with them, every single one of them. So a big, big push.
“I’m challenging everyone at the team, particularly the guys at the top. If you look at the team for the last 20 years, they have had some amazing drivers – Fernando [Alonso], Kimi [Raikkonen], Sebastian [Vettel].
“Amazing drivers but they didn’t win a title – and I refuse to have that happen with me. If you do the same things you have the same results, so I’m challenging everything. They are very responsive.”
Usually when one driver is underperforming relative to the other, a team will naturally gravitate towards the one who is faring best, and their opinion on development matters will carry more weight than the other’s. But Vasseur worked very hard to support Hamilton and shield him from his critics.
Also, the point Hamilton made is accurate and will have resonated with management. There is a famous quote, popularly if incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, that the definition of insanity is repeating the same course of action and expecting a different result. Ferrari has had one of the most consistently strong driver line-ups in recent seasons but hasn’t given them consistently the best equipment or slick race operations.
Among the changes, Hamilton wanted more innovation and the SF-26 certainly couldn’t be described as conservative. He also wanted a new race engineer and the relationship with Carlo Santi appears to have exceeded expectations. Santi was shuffled back into a factory-based role after race-engineering
Kimi Raikkonen during his second Ferrari stint, and it’s understood his initial appointment with Hamilton in place of Riccardo Adami was on a temporary basis. But Hamilton is delighted with the engineer he has described as “an Italian ‘Bono” - his nickname for longtime Mercedes engineer Peter Bonnington, now working with
Kimi Antonelli.
"Him kind of substituting this year, jumping in and diving in deep with me – we didn't know each other, we'd never spoken and I didn't really know anything about him. We met and I think got on straight away," said Hamilton in Barcelona. "It's great to be able to connect with an engineer other than what I used to have. I had it for such a long time and then you kind of lose that feeling because Bono's now doing it with Kimi [Antonelli].
"He [Santi] is very, very quiet. You could tell it's hard for him to express his emotions. He's just smiley and I'm giving him these big hugs and pulling him in, saying 'thank you'. I like to think that this [race win] has probably reignited the love that he has of being an engineer as he has done for me as a driver.
"The changes that I've asked for and pushed for all last year have been made and I now have the right team around me, I now have the right car around me, and now I can start doing what I do best. The team have really listened and really worked hard to add performance and be innovative. This year is all about innovation. We came out with the bit on the rear exhaust. We came out with, what else was it, the rear wing, the Macarena [pivoting rear wing plane]. This is what I was asking for last year. It was like, this team has to be the leaders in that, and they've shown that they can and they will."
Among the more recent changes which appear to have paid off is to let Hamilton work through putative baseline set-ups with his engineers via existing data rather than evaluating hypothetical set-ups in the simulator. He has been a prominent critic of the relationship between simulator results and real on-track performance.
Leclerc has taken a different view, saying the simulator “works for me”. Mind you, he said that three race weekends ago and may not offer the same response when asked now.
Hamilton was also granted a major concession ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix weekend in the form of Carbone Industrie brake materials being adopted on his car in place of longtime Ferrari partner Brembo. Hamilton has long been a fan of CIs, believing this gives him the necessary feel he requires.
But if Hamilton has been thriving, Leclerc has been floundering in recent races. He is reliably among the fastest drivers on the grid over a single lap, and the gold standard in qualifying. And yet he has put his Ferrari in the wall during Q3 on two consecutive weekends now.
That speaks to a combination of factors nudging him to hustle beyond the car’s limits. In each case, circumstances had contrived to leave him needing that lap to count. Normally you would bank on Leclerc to do that, but in both Monaco and Barcelona small errors had major consequences.
Grand prix history is rich with examples of previously reliable drivers beginning to push too hard in qualifying when put under pressure by a fast team-mate. Could that be what’s happening here?
In Barcelona Leclerc also trialled Carbone Industrie braking materials, a sure sign that he had lost confidence in the previous set-up – which he blamed for his retirement in Monaco. Very few single factors in car performance prompt a driver to lose their mojo as damagingly as unpredictable braking.
