Why Hamilton ditched the F1 sim - and why he thinks it was making him slower

In the week before the Canadian Grand Prix, while most of his rivals were logging hours in their teams’ multi-million-pound simulators, Lewis Hamilton did something that would strike many in the paddock as almost wilfully contrarian: He stayed away.

No laps, no set-up work, no correlation runs. Just data, conversations with his engineers, and a deliberate decision to trust what he finds at the track rather than what a machine tells him to expect.

It is not, he is at pains to point out, a statement against simulation as a technology.

The Ferrari simulator, by his account, is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, one he has had significant input in developing since his arrival at Maranello.

His decision to step back from it is something more nuanced than rejection – it is the product of a long, careful reassessment of when the tool helps and when it does not.

“The sim is amazing,” he said on Thursday ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix. “It’s an amazing space to work in. It’s the best sim I’ve ever seen and the best group of people that I’ve known.”

Hamilton’s relationship with simulators stretches back to 1997, when McLaren ran what he describes as the sport’s first serious effort – a fixed cockpit with force feedback steering at their old Woking factory.

He was a teenager then, being groomed for a future that was not yet guaranteed. By the time he arrived in Formula 1, simulation had evolved considerably, but his feelings about it remained ambivalent.

“I didn’t particularly enjoy it,” he said of his early McLaren years in the car. “They were kind of long days and a lot of laps. There’s a point at which you stop learning when you’re doing so many laps, for me personally.”

At Mercedes, the ambivalence deepened into something closer to scepticism.

“When I joined Mercedes, they were quite far off with the sim at the time,” he recalled. “I didn’t use it in all the championships that we won, barely used the simulator, very rarely.”

It is a surprising claim. Seven titles, the most dominant run in the sport’s history, were achieved without meaningful simulator input.

Hamilton began re-engaging with it around 2020 and 2021, and by last year was using it weekly. The results, by his own assessment, did not justify the effort.

“More often than not, I felt you do all the work on the sim, and you get to the track, you find a set-up that you’re comfortable with, you get to the track and everything is opposite.”

In his telling, the problem is not that the simulator is inaccurate in any fundamental sense; it is that its correlation with real-world conditions is imperfect and unpredictable, meaning the mental models he builds in preparation can actively work against him once he is at the circuit.

“Then you’re undoing the things you’ve learned, some of the ways you’ve approached the corners you have to shift and adjust,” he added. “Set-up that you felt that was good on the simulator is not the same at the track.”

There is one exception that illuminates the rule.

“There’s only ever been really one time through all the years that I’ve used the sim in these 20 years that the set-up that I had on the sim was the exact set-up I used in qualifying and qualified pole,” he said.

“And that was Singapore 2012.”

One race in roughly two decades of simulator use where preparation translated perfectly into performance.

For the 2026 season, there is reason to think that the gap between simulator and reality may be wider than ever.

George Russell highlighted one dimension of the problem in Montreal, noting that the cognitive demands of managing the new power unit architecture have crowded out more fundamental areas of focus.

“A lot of us are also focused on the energy management,” he said. “All of the issues from the past in dealing with the tyres, dealing with the set-up, just fundamentals racing, has kind of been put on the back burner because we’re also focused on energy management.”