MPH: Why Charles Leclerc's battle with Hamilton-inspired Ferrari is not Lewis's fault

One of the many fascinations about last weekend’s British Grand Prix was Charles Leclerc bouncing back into form after struggling for four races (since Canada) to match the performance of his re-invigorated team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

This seems to have confounded many, especially those who’d built up the simplistic narrative that Hamilton had arrived at Ferrari and spent a year re-organising it to make a better car, one in which he would then demonstrate his natural advantage over Leclerc, who was only quicker in the poor ’25 car because Hamilton was busy with bigger concerns like ensuring the ’26 car was good.

If only reality were so simple. There are elements – small ones – within that narrative which have a grain of truth. Hamilton has of course been very focused on communicating with the team about what he needs from a car and how last year’s car prevented him from driving in his natural way. Specifically, he wanted a more aggressive brake pedal and the elimination of engine braking to aid rotation. They were his requests. The way they were achieved was up to the engineering team to accomplish and they would involve a lot of rethinking about how to create the best aero map to achieve competitive downforce but with the type of balance transitions into and through the corners that he requested.

The Ferrari engineering team was aided in this by the regulation reset of 2026. Because one of the traps of the ground effect regs was the very narrow operating window imposed between low-speed understeer and high-speed entry instability. You could cure one, but at the expense of the other, in essence. With these cars, that’s much less the case. The regulations have created a much more aerodynamically benign balance range, with a far greater range of set-up options for the drivers.

Leclerc – with a natural style of heavy overlapping of braking with cornering – had evolved with a car which had plenty of engine braking to aid rotation into the corner, the resistance of the inside rear wheel effectively making the car turn more quickly. When used in conjunction with Hamilton’s more aggressive way of using the steering and with less overlap of braking, it didn’t really work very well, made the car too nervous in medium- to high-speed turns.

In the ground-effect Ferraris, Leclerc, brilliant at maintaining momentum in an oversteering car, would even tame any over-rotation by using the throttle, sometimes even when still on the brakes. Keeping some throttle applied could give some stability into those entries, effectively reducing the engine braking by not lifting fully. Studying his telemetry around, say, Bahrain or Baku, would reveal a brilliantly intricate dance between all four limbs on steering, throttle and brakes, sometimes all three simultaneously.

The ’26 cars don’t need to be driven like that. In fact, they don’t like being driven like that – mainly because using the throttle creatively like that costs battery power, which will deprive you on the straight where it can give the most lap time reward.

So just as Hamilton was trying to drive against the grain in last year’s car, so Leclerc was coming up with a similar problem with this one. But only sometimes. The first few races were fine, even if those acrobatics could no longer give him an edge; he was still accessing the car’s potential. He was perfectly fine in this Hamilton-inspired car. But the braking problems reared their head from Canada and he’s been re-acclimatising to the CI discs, which he took from Barcelona onwards (four races after Hamilton). At Silverstone, he finally cracked the code.

“It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car. These cars are very specific, are very different to the way we’ve been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it. I was very strong for the first part of the season, then I lost a bit of feeling with the car. We changed quite a few things with the car and it took a bit more time than what I had wished to get back to the level I wanted…

“It’s more about small details that just fit my driving a little bit better in a particular phase of the corner. I don’t want to go too much into detail there. But it’s just a few things that I saw on the data on Friday night and I was like, ‘OK, that might be things that just don’t fit with my driving style.’ And we changed those few things from sprint race to qualifying and that was a lot better. So yeah, I was very proud of the work we’ve done to see that because I think this kind of change is not really so black and white. You just don’t look at data and say, ‘My God, OK, this is what we need to change.’ It’s intuition mixed with feeling. Then we went for it and it was actually a very successful direction for me.”

The tweak is believed to be in the torque map and the differential settings. With the big instant electrical torque, his use of the throttle was giving instability on the entry to the medium-fast turns of Silverstone. His ease with oversteer doesn’t mean it’s faster that way. It can be on a short corner. But on a long-duration corner a grippy rear is always better. The brutal torque delivery of the ‘26 PUs exaggerated that problem. Detuning the delivery in conjunction with a more appropriate diff setting gave him the feeling back from Saturday afternoon onwards, allowing him to add more front wing to give him the slow-corner front-end response that he can exploit perhaps better than anyone.

So that’s the basic backdrop. But these are questions of set-up, not of the basic car traits. They are a given and both drivers can work within them perfectly well.

There is then the question of what baseline set-up each driver takes into the weekend, the foundation from which he will work. Leclerc chose a baseline based on the simulator and how he naturally drives. Hamilton distrusts the simulator and opted for a set-up prioritising rear grip. Hamilton’s estimation proved much more accurate and Leclerc moved towards it during practice and before the sprint.

What happened after the cars came out of parc ferme after the Saturday sprint race was that Hamilton, who’d just lost the sprint to Kimi Antonelli to inferior rear tyre deg after leading most of it from pole, took some front wing out to look after the rears.

Leclerc, with a different set of problems and references, added more wing and changed his diff in addition to the torque delivery settings.