Lewis Hamilton is keen to work with Ferrari during the winter break to fix issues that impeded his debut Formula 1 season with the team in 2025.
Hamilton has witnessed a couple of ‘firsts’ in his debut season with the Maranello-based team; however, some of them, he would rather have not.
While Hamilton did win his first-ever Sprint Race for Ferrari in Shanghai, the seven-time World Champion signed off his maiden campaign with the Italian marque without a single Grand Prix podium to his name for the first time ever in his F1 career.
His single-lap pace also took a hammering, as he quite publicly struggled to assimilate with Ferrari, and the SF-25.
The last three rounds of the 2025 season saw the 40-year-old knocked out of Q1 successively – the last time Hamilton had endured such a streak was all the way back in 2009 with McLaren over the Monaco, Turkey and British GP weekends.
Looking forward to his sophomore year with the team, Hamilton hinted at a comprehensive off-season programme to ameliorate the issues hindering his competitiveness in 2025.
“I think we just need to analyse where we’ve been, what’s been good, areas that we can improve on,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
The Briton has been pretty hands on with his inputs to Ferrari, famously even sending over a dossier of documents highlighting the areas the team needed to improve at.
Speaking about his plans during the winter break, Hamilton revealed that he already had informed the team about what he wanted rectified heading into F1’s latest era with the 2026 regulations overhaul.
“I’ve highlighted, I mean, I know where they all are. It’s sitting down with the team at the end of the year,” he added.
“I’ll look internally at my personal team away from the track and see what we can do more to make it more efficient with timing and travelling and all these different things. And I’ll do the same with the team.”
Hamilton had already ‘anticipated’ Ferrari’s 2025 F1 woes
Hamilton’s announcement that he would be racing for Ferrari had built up quite an appetite for the tifosi heading into the 2025 season.
Expectations were high from the duo, especially after the strong end to the 2024 campaign for Ferrari that saw it challenge McLaren for the Constructors’.
That said, internally, Hamilton conceded that the team were already “anticipating” a relative lack of pace compared to its rivals.
Then, the decision to stop development on the SF-25 in April, to focus on 2026, while “right” did make matters particularly “worse” for Hamilton and team-mate Charles Leclerc.
“I didn’t know at the end of the year we’d be where we are, no. We anticipated it, but it felt worse, naturally,” Hamilton explained.
“I was a part of, you know, I was one pushing Fred [Vasseur]. It’s like we can’t fall behind the others in terms of that development for the new car, because it’s a steep learning curve for all of us. So, I supported it 100 per cent.
“I think it was the right decision. Particularly where we were already with the car, we weren’t fighting for a championship.
“But it’s just meant that it’s been harder to maintain the performance, at least some of the performance we had at the beginning of the year.”
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