This wasn’t in the script, was it? Five races into his fairytale move to Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton’s season is – much like his rear tIres – sliding towards nightmare status after another chastening result at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
The seven-time champion finished in P7 more than 30 seconds behind teammate Charles Leclerc – who piloted the other Ferrari to the podium – having been half a second off the Monegasque in Q3 and outqualified by the chap he replaced… in a Williams. Awkward.
And Lewis looked despondent after the race, telling Sky Sports “there wasn’t one second” where he felt comfortable. “Clearly the car is capable of being P3 so… Charles did a great job today, so I can’t blame it on the car.” Any ideas why things weren’t clicking? “No.” End of interview. More awkward.
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This was having said he needed a “brain transplant” to get his head around the SF-25, that 2025 was going to be “painful”, and that he’d been “grateful” to scrape his way into Q3 by all of seven thousands of a second. Won’t someone just give that man a hug?
What’s all the more baffling is that Hamilton has actually won something this season, taking sprint race pole in China and then converting it into victory the following day with apparent ease.
So what’s going wrong? Has Ferrari fitted its 2020-spec engine by mistake? Are the pedals the wrong way round? Are the tires a set of four illusion cakes that look like normal Pirellis but are actually victoria sponges inside?
Lewis has talked at length this year about working out how the Ferrari likes to be driven, so different is it to what he had at Mercedes. Apparently he’s still getting to grips with the Ferrari’s engine braking, as well as its actual brakes (which are manufactured by a different supplier) and overall confidence in the car to not slingshot him off into the barriers.
Is Hamilton simply too good to not figure this out eventually? Or is this generation of ground effect cars – to be ditched at the end of this year – just not something he’s ever going to gel with? Theories below please.
NOTE: This story first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
