Lewis Hamilton has been warned that he could experience the same trouble adapting at Ferrari as Daniel Ricciardo did during his tumultuous stint with McLaren in Formula 1.
Hamilton has undergone several outings in previous Ferrari cars in recent weeks as the team endeavours to get him up to speed prior to his debut campaign in red in 2025.
The Briton has been getting accustomed to how the Ferrari engine operates having used Mercedes power in the 356 starts that he has made to date in his illustrious career.
Ferrari is reported to have used Hamilton’s sessions in the side’s simulator in Maranello to erase the processes that he had been acquainted with at Mercedes since 2013.
However, veteran Mercedes simulator driver Anthony Davidson has cautioned that such practices provide no guarantee that Hamilton will sustain a seamless transition.
Davidson pointed to Ricciardo’s struggles to gel with McLaren’s braking characteristics, resulting in him being axed two seasons into his spell with the squad at the end of 2022.
The Australian had garnered a reputation for having a supreme touch on the brake pedal, but he was seldom able to exploit that during his truncated time at McLaren.
“The controls like the pedals, the steering wheel of the car [are things he will have to adapt to],” Davidson, also a pundit with Sky Sports F1, told RacingNews365.
“We’ve heard lots of different drivers in the past, like Kimi [Raikkonen] when he went to Ferrari [in 2007] complaining about the steering compared to his McLaren days.
“Daniel Ricciardo, when he moved to McLaren and struggled with the brakes, he never got to grips with it.
“Sometimes, it will never feel like the car you want it to in terms of controls, no matter how much you work with the engineers to try and rectify it.
“Hopefully, for his sake, he is lucky and it all feels intuitive, it feels like the Mercedes he is used to and he can hit the ground running, but there is always the chance that when a driver moves team, it never quite feels like home for some reason.”
Hamilton more at home with Ferrari cars
Like Ricciardo, Hamilton has discovered that his late-braking tendencies haven’t been conducive to extracting the best lap time with these current ground effect cars.
Hamilton’s woes have been less severe as he still won twice in 2024, but his final season with Mercedes comprised a 19-5 drubbing in qualifying to George Russell.
But according to Italian outlet Gazzetta dello Sport, the seven-time F1 champion reported “good feelings” and “praised the behaviour” of the Ferrari cars he’s driven.
The publication goes on to claim that some have said that Hamilton “immediately found himself better” in the Ferrari than the Mercedes cars he has sampled in this era.
An Italian racing driver who was present at Fiorano to watch Hamilton’s maiden Ferrari run at Fiorano in the 2023 SF-23 observed that he was already starting to experiment.
“Even though it was really damp, wet and really cold, we saw Lewis try different stuff,” Vicky Piria told Sky Italia at the test venue.
“We saw him work a bit with the E-Diff, we saw him work with the brake balance, saw some locking.
“He wasn’t just going around and doing installation laps, he was actually trying things. Not pushing pushing, but trying things.
“That’s him getting into the momentum, understanding things, the settings on the steering wheel and how they work.
“They learn everything on the sim but then actually transferring the feelings onto the real track. So it’s really forward motion for him because it’s not long before Australia.”
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