Why it's too early to declare that Hamilton is back

Lewis Hamilton was radiant after the Canadian Grand Prix. He spoke about feeling the car, about joy, about something having clicked between him and his engineering team that had not been there before.

On his way to second, his best result with Ferrari, he brushed the wall of champions with his rear tyre, close enough to make the heart rate spike, controlled enough to suggest it might have been almost intentional.

For the first time in a long time, the question being asked about Hamilton was not whether he was struggling. It was whether he was back.

It is a fair question. It is also, for now, unanswerable, and the reasons why matter as much as the performance itself.

Hamilton has always been exceptional in Montreal. In 18 years at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, he has outqualified his team-mates 16 times, including this year.

Shanghai, where he also ran strongly earlier this season, is another circuit that historically brings out something particular in him, a track where his instincts and the demands of the lap align in ways that are not always replicated elsewhere.

Even during his 2025 season, Hamilton won the sprint race in China, the one highlight of his debut year with Ferrari.

China and Canada are two of his last four races. Both at circuits where he’s always been exceptionally good.

That is not a reason to dismiss what happened in Canada – driving a circuit well still requires driving it well – but it is a reason not to yet treat it as conclusive evidence of a broader transformation.

The Leclerc caveat

There is a second complication, and it is quite significant. Team-mate Charles Leclerc described Montreal as the worst weekend of his career.

The Monegasque was unable to get the tyres switched on, which meant his performance told you almost nothing about the relative level of the two Ferrari drivers.

Montreal and Shanghai are, by Leclerc’s own admission, two circuits he has never been able to get on with.

Hamilton’s two strongest results of the season have come at the two circuits where his team-mate is weakest. That overlap makes extracting a clean narrative about a driver rediscovering his best form quite difficult.

None of which diminishes what Hamilton actually did in Canada.

His pursuit of Max Verstappen near the end of the race, closing the gap back down, then committing to the move, was executed with the kind of composure that has been absent from his recent seasons.

Hamilton was the aggressor, and he looked comfortable being one.

“You could see how he was indulging himself in just the sheer joy of driving it and racing it,” said Mark Hughes in the latest Motor Sport F1 Show podcast.

Hamilton himself points to something specific in what has changed: a better alignment between what he asks of the car and what his engineering team understands him to be asking.

He has spoken about the braking feel being right, a detail that matters enormously for a driver whose entry technique depends on precise modulation under heavy braking, and about a growing fluency in the communication between driver and engineer.

Whether that reflects a genuine technical breakthrough or an accumulation of small adjustments across the season is unclear from the outside, but the effect in Canada was visible.

Hamilton has also benefitted from skipping any simulator work ahead of the Montreal weekend, something he claimed has made him faster.

Monaco will tell

The next race is Monaco, and Monaco changes the terms of the question entirely.

It is not a Hamilton circuit in the way that Montreal is a Hamilton circuit.

More importantly, it is emphatically a Leclerc circuit: he is rarely anything other than exceptional there, and the tight, unforgiving nature of the streets tends to expose any driver whose confidence in the car is even slightly fragile.