Ferrari has asserted that its relationship with Lewis Hamilton is not as bad as it was depicted at times during his maiden Formula 1 campaign with the team in 2025.
Hamilton’s opening season with Ferrari proved to be an unmemorable one as he concluded the year without a single trip to the podium for the first time in his career.
With results not living up to expectations, Hamilton’s collaboration with race engineer Riccardo Adami was placed under the microscope amid terse radio exchanges.
But while Hamilton dismissed there were “issues” in the relationship, there continued to be moments that attracted headlines between the two until the season’s end.
However, Ferrari’s Head of Track Engineering, Matteo Togninalli, has contended that the view on the outside doesn’t align with the reality on the inside within the team.
“Changing drivers and changing teams, mainly for a driver like Lewis, who has spent 10 years in the same team, has a certain level of experience, is very difficult from both sides, for the driver and for the team,” Togninalli told media including Motorsport Week.
“Every team is operating in a slightly different way, you are used to certain people, things in a central way. Then, if you put this in context, that you have the fact that Lewis was winning World Championships, and it’s a fact this year, we didn’t achieve the target of fighting for the World Championship, so you have the frustration creating the situation.
“I think what you see from outside is quite worse than what it is. I think the relationship with Lewis, what we are building with Lewis, is extremely positive. He spent 10 years in the same team, with the same people, and after 10 months, I think we have already a very, very strong link with him.
“Nevertheless, the frustration, the results, are creating this image of ourselves and of him in Ferrari, that I believe is much, much worse than what it is in reality.
“Why [is he] struggling? Again, I think part is the frustration, part is as I said that we need some time to adapt to each other, and maybe we both, the team and Lewis, under-evaluated this at the beginning. I’m confident, as I said, I don’t think the relationship is as bad as you all guys think. But I’m sure with time we’ll improve.”
The root cause of Ferrari’s performance woes in 2025
Ferrari ended the season without a single win, which Togninalli has attributed to the team’s poor single-lap pace undermining the SF-25’s competitiveness in race trim.
“90 per cent of the job this year is done in qualifying; if you start in front, you finish in front,” he explained as all but eight races were won from pole position.
“If you start behind, unless you do something very different than what you only if you are last, it is extremely difficult to overtake. I think point number one, tyres this year are extremely sensitive in the single lap. You can see in Brazil with [Max] Verstappen – in the Sprint Quali, he is in front – and then he is in P16.
“You can move around two, three tenths only with the preparation of the tyres in qualifying. This is where we have been focusing. This is where I think we improved. And then it’s a lot of situations.
“If we take Vegas, the bollard with Lewis cost us the qualifying. If you look at it, it is a bit situational. With Charles [Leclerc] we didn’t get the last lap in Q3. I am sure we could perform better. If you freeze the Q3 quali two minutes earlier, it was P3.
“I think the key factor are the tyres. I think everybody is struggling with that. If you look, there is a lot of variability. We are all within two tenths. So a small difference makes a lot of difference. Some quali we have 10 cars in a tenth.”
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