On paper Lewis Hamilton’s move to Scuderia Ferrari appeared to be a case of perfect timing; it wouldn’t be long, so we thought, before he’d be challenging for race wins.

When he signed in January last year the Maranello team had just finished third in the 2023 Formula 1 World Championship with 406 points, having scored one win in a season dominated by Red Bull.

He then watched with interest as his future employers moved up to second place last year on 652 points, with Charles Leclerc and the departing Carlos Sainz logging five victories between them. The team seemingly had momentum on its side.

Having spent three years struggling with a series of tricky Mercedes ‘divas’ Hamilton could be forgiven for thinking that – as with his decision to leave McLaren at the end of 2012 – he was heading to the right place at the right time.

The reality has proved to be rather different. Not only did he fail to win a full-length race in the first half of the 2025 season, but he also didn’t log a podium finish.

Amid the obvious frustration there have been flashes of promise. He won the Shanghai sprint from pole on only his second weekend, and after some sessions and races he’s had a smile on his face as he’s reported apparent signs of progress.

However at times it’s appeared to be a case of one step forwards and two back as he’s tried to find his way, and inevitably his results have had some observers asking if his best days are now behind him.

So what hasn’t worked out so far for Lewis? Why has it gone wrong? And what hope is there for a turn-around in the second half of the season and into next year?

“Hamilton has genuinely struggled to adjust to a new environment”

I have spent the past two years attending every grand prix covering the biggest story in F1 as the seven-time champion beds in to the world’s most storied race team. By pulling together briefings and interviews – usually those which take place in the team motorhome post race with a select group of reporters and away from the televised press conferences – I have been able to build up a clearer picture of where this dream team partnership currently is and, crucially, where it is going.

The one thing that is crystal clear is that Hamilton has genuinely struggled to adjust to a new and unfamiliar environment as well as to a car whose behaviour is completely alien. This has been compounded by the fact that Maranello has produced a lacklustre car – note that Leclerc’s results have also shown the SF-25 isn’t as competitive as the previous season’s SF-24. And of course Ferrari has been slow to react: both drivers were crying out for updates, and they had to wait until the Austrian GP at the end of June for a new floor to finally arrive.

Some may scoff at the suggestion that it’s difficult for an established top driver to change teams. Surely adapting to different cars is part of a world champion’s make-up?

Indeed if you consider Hamilton’s predecessors at Ferrari, Fernando Alonso won on his debut in 2010 and finished runner-up in that year’s championship, while Sebastian Vettel triumphed on his second outing in 2015 and ended the season third in the points.

However over the last decade cars and team structures have become ever more complex beasts, and thus there’s an extra premium on stability. Hamilton benefited from that over his 12 years at Mercedes, honing the technical package and the team around him and forging close relationships with all the key people, notably race engineer Peter Bonnington, with whom he had an almost telepathic connection.

Now that sheer level of muscle memory and ingrained familiarity with the Brackley car’s DNA and his former team’s staff, methodology and systems has made it that much harder to start afresh elsewhere. Even details like a switch to Brembo brakes, which behave differently to what he was previously used to, have had a big impact.

He’s also up against Leclerc, acknowledged as one of the quickest guys on the current grid and now in his seventh season as a Ferrari driver – having been embedded in the Maranello camp far longer than that.

Leclerc has had the edge over one lap, and including the two sprints the qualifying battle stood at 9-5 after Silverstone, with their average starting positions standing at 5.5 and 6.5 respectively.

It’s certainly not a disaster, and intriguingly Hamilton was in front in three of the last four Q3 sessions up to the halfway point, suggesting that he’s making progress. But it’s not been as fast as he wants.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Carlos Sainz says of Hamilton’s struggles in the context of his own switch from Ferrari to Williams. “I expected it for myself, and I expected it with him. In this sport there are no secrets, and when you are up against two team-mates like we are, like Alex [Albon] and Charles, they know the team inside out, and they are already performing at the maximum that that car can perform.

“You can only do just a little bit better or the same as them. You cannot suddenly arrive and be two, three-tenths quicker, because it’s not possible. They are already at the limit of the car.

“So when you jump to any team and you’re expected by yourself and by everyone around you to be at that level, you know it’s going to take time.”

If you look at the other key players in the 2025 field, Max Verstappen is in his 10th season at Red Bull, Lando Norris has been racing for McLaren for seven years and George Russell has been at Mercedes for four. And in each case their history with those teams extends back to their junior days.

The one outlier is Oscar Piastri, now in only his third year at McLaren. Arguably the Aussie had little to unlearn from his time as an Alpine protégé, and yet he still needed a couple of seasons to get fully up to speed and on a par with Norris.

It’s been a while since such a high-profile driver has switched teams and been under such an intense spotlight – don’t forget the entire entry list went unchanged from 2023 to 2024 – so it’s easy to be sceptical about the challenges involved.

“I’m continuing to keep my head down, continuing to work away”

Hamilton arrived in a camp where he knew hardly anyone other than team principal Fred Vasseur, his boss in F3/GP2 back in 2005-06. He faced the challenge of adapting to not just a different car, but also an unfamiliar power unit. He had spent the previous 18 seasons with Mercedes HPP products behind him, dealing with the same engineers and the same family of switches and control systems and so on.

“I’m still learning this new car. It’s quite a lot different from what I’ve driven my whole career,” he noted at the Melbourne season opener. “In the sense of the Mercedes power coming to the Ferrari power, it’s something quite new – different vibration, different feel, different way of working.

“The whole team works completely differently. I was just sitting looking at last year’s race traces, and they’re upside down compared to the previous ones, what I’ve been used to. I don’t understand it all.”

If that sounds a little far-fetched his view was backed up by Sainz, who took the opposite route, switching from Ferrari to Mercedes power.

Had he been allowed by Toto Wolff to take part in the Abu Dhabi Pirelli test in December, Hamilton would have had a crucial two-month head start. However, commercial considerations and a commitment to a Petronas event meant that he was denied that vital opportunity – one that was afforded to fellow movers Sainz at Williams, Esteban Ocon at Haas and Nico Hülkenberg at Sauber.

Once he was officially a Ferrari driver in January he had a couple of early outings in old cars on unrepresentative tyres, and then it was straight into the SF-25 and just a day and a half of testing in Bahrain before the first race in Australia. To say that he was on a steep learning curve in the early races would be an understatement.

“It just feels so alien, it really does feel so alien,” he admits. “I think we all get stuck in our ways, and I’ve been very stuck. I said, ‘I need to keep driving the way I’m driving to make the car come to me.’ But it’s not working. So I am adjusting myself now to the car, and also with the tools, it drives so much different with all the ECU, the controls that we have. You have to use them a lot differently to the past.

“Just one example is I never used engine braking before, for the past 12 years. Well, here we use a lot of engine braking to turn the car. The brakes are so much different to what I had in the past. In the last stint, I had to use the rears to turn the car, and then other times you have to put all the weight on the front. It’s probably a bigger balance window than I’m used to.”

What has perhaps been a shock to the system for Hamilton is that at each venue he has had to start from zero, with little of his accumulated knowledge from past years of much relevance as he adapts to the peculiarities of the SF-25.

“I’m continuing to keep my head down, continuing to work away,” he says. “The fact is every time I go to the track it’s a new characteristic of the car at that track. When I start on Friday, I’m like, ‘Shoot, this is so different to what I raced here with last year.’

“You’d be just so surprised at the different way you have to set things, and the different way you have to turn the car through corners, but I think I’ve got on top of it to the best of my ability.”

In terms of specific handling traits Hamilton has highlighted that the car understeers in slow corners to a greater degree than anything he’s ever experienced. Meanwhile when trying to follow Leclerc’s set-up preferences he found the car too oversteery for his liking, and initially he took a step back.

“He drives a massively oversteering car and somehow slides the rears and doesn’t have degradation,” Hamilton explains of his team-mate’s choices. “When I slide the rears, I get massive degradation. I suppose it took Carlos a couple of years to get used to that.”

In Austria and Silverstone he moved towards Leclerc’s arrangement once more, adapting his driving to suit, and it appeared to pay off in terms of his performance relative to his team-mate.

“We have lots of different tools and things, the ways in which we can set the car up,” he says. “Obviously, Charles has been here for a long time, and he’s been a part of evolving, developing this car. He’s very accustomed to it, and he’s found one way in which the car works.

“I’ve tried all the other directions that should work, but they just don’t, for whatever reasons. And I’ve slowly migrated to the place where Charles does run the car. It is still tough, it’s a tough balance to drive, and it’s not a comfortable one. It’s not one that I want to have in future.”

And the future is the key to the story, given that for all teams this season is a step towards the brave new world of 2026.

Hamilton made his decision to switch camps with an eye firmly on who might have the best overall package under the next set of regulations. Don’t forget that he endured a challenging first season at Mercedes with the last of the V8 cars in 2013 – and it took the arrival of the hybrid V6 the following year for his move from McLaren to properly pay off.

Nobody can predict how the pecking order of PU manufacturers will unfold with the new rules. However Hamilton has a crucial ally on the chassis side who can influence things in his direction.

Loic Serra worked closely with him for almost his entire 12-year stint at Mercedes, initially as head of vehicle dynamics and then performance director. Given that engineering focus, the Frenchman developed a good understanding what Lewis wants from a car, and how he thinks.

In May 2024 he was announced in a similar performance engineering role at Ferrari. However by the time he actually started work in October his job had morphed into that of chassis technical director, with overall responsibility for the 2026 car.

While Serra’s priority is to create the fastest package possible, clearly as part of that quest he will take Hamilton’s preferences on board.

“I’m working with Loic and the whole crew on next year’s front suspension and rear suspension,” Lewis says. “And addressing the understeer issues, making sure we’re learning from their previous years and also what we’re learning from this year, so that next year is the best that we’ve ever had. That’s my main focus.”

Elaborating on that process Lewis says that with Serra’s help he wants “to make sure that the next car will have naturally some of my DNA in it. And hopefully we’ll be able to get some of the characteristics that I’m hoping to have in it for next year.”

A new driver and new technical boss potentially steering a car away from the preferences of his long-term incumbent team-mate sounds like the plot of the next F1 movie. However Leclerc is not worried about a Serra/Hamilton collaboration.

“I’ve only just started with Ferrari. I’m here for the long-haul”

“I’m not concerned at all,” says the Monegasque. “It’s always a big talking point, I think, outside the team. But within the team we’ve got all the tools to adapt a car to my way in terms of driving style, or to Lewis’s style. So I don’t think that’s the problem, and I just want the fastest car possible next year. I think that’s exactly what Lewis wants. And then wherever we are next year, then I’ll set-up the car in a way that I like, and Lewis will do just the same.

“We are in a time where now in F1, with where the technology is, we just put the fastest car on track, and then we’ve got all the freedom available. It’s not like 10 or 15 years ago, where you were a bit stuck into a corner in terms of balance, and you didn’t have the tools to make the car go faster.”

Hamilton’s assimilation into Ferrari is not just about the hardware. There have been some very public lessons played out over team radio as he has challenged race engineer Riccardo Adami on specific strategy calls and on the general level of info that he needs – or doesn’t need – during a race.

“Ultimately, we have a great relationship,” Hamilton says of speculation about their occasionally frosty conversations. “He’s been amazing to work with. He’s a great guy, working so hard. We both are, and we don’t always get it right every weekend. Do we have disagreements like everyone does in relationships? Yes. But we work through them. We’re both in it together. We both want to win a championship together. We’re both working towards lifting the team up. It’s just all noise, and we don’t really pay any attention to it. It doesn’t make any difference to the job that we’re trying to do.”

The radio chat has been testy at times. One example occurred in Austria, where Adami told Hamilton to pit, and the frustrated driver wanted to extend his stint. Lewis suggests the exchange, subsequently discussed internally, reflected a philosophical clash about how to approach races.

“I think the team’s first view was they just wanted to make sure they secured third and fourth, which is totally fine. But I said, ‘Look, I’m not here to start fourth and finish fourth. I’m racing for every little bit that we can gain.’

“And in a scenario like that, for example, they had us on exactly the same strategy. I’d never want to do the same thing as my team-mate, ever.

“And I said, ‘I don’t want to get to a point where I’m ignoring you.’ So what we’re doing is working on our communication. And we’re still getting to know each other, how we like to operate.”

Comms is a high-profile aspect, but behind the scenes Hamilton has been plugging away trying to change the way Ferrari works in many areas.

“There’s a lot that needs improving,” he says. “A lot of things need to be changed. I know we’re not fighting for a win this year. I know we’re not in the championship, which is not a great feeling.

“I also know I’m in a period of getting accustomed to working with the team, foundation-building and trying to steer them to make those changes so that next year we can have a car that can win, and we can then fight and be consistent.

“So with that in mind, I’m OK. But obviously I want to win. And so when you’re not competing at the front, you’re not fighting for podiums. I’m definitely a little bit gutted with that.”

All of this is playing out against the usual polemics that always surround Ferrari when things aren’t going entirely to plan.

Ferrari chair John Elkann may have been the initial driving force behind trying to get Hamilton on board, but it was the presence of Vasseur that convinced him to leave the comfort zone of Mercedes.

Given Ferrari’s mediocre form the Frenchman has been in the firing line in the Italian media amid doubts about his future, which have not been dampened by the sudden availability of Christian Horner as a possible alternative. Respected Ferrari WEC boss Antonello Colleta has also been mentioned, and if there was a sudden change he would perhaps be less of a shock to the system for Lewis than Horner.

The bottom line is that Vasseur and Hamilton remain inextricably linked and both deserve to be judged on 2026. In the meantime speculation about the former world champion questioning his own future is wide of the mark, as he said at Spa where he started 18th but went on to finish 7th after some vintage passes.

“It is a huge organisation with a lot of moving parts and not all of them are firing on all cylinders,” he said ahead of the race. “I feel like it’s my job to challenge everyone in the team, particularly those at the top.”

In a clear sign that he believes the best is yet to come, he added: “The team have had amazing drivers – Fernando, Sebastian – and yet they didn’t win a title with Ferrari. I refuse for that to be the case with me.”