MPH: The real Lewis Hamilton is back. This is why

Lewis Hamilton’s breakthrough victory with Ferrari at Barcelona last weekend was the outcome of a long, hard slog. But not only that. It was also the product of the weight he carried with him through his previous achievements, a team boss who put his neck on the line to give Hamilton what he said he needed, and a fortuitous change in technical regulations.

Alex Albon predicted Hamilton’s ’26 speed pre-season. “I think these cars will suit Lewis,” he said on the Williams team’s podcast. “Lighter cars and the way he shortens the corner without really worrying about the exits, I think will work well for him.”

Given how difficult Hamilton’s ’25 had been – well behind team-mate Charles Leclerc in both qualifying (16-8 down) and points score (only 64% of Leclerc’s) – and some incredibly difficult moments where he was even lambasting his own performances and suggesting the team should ‘look at getting a different driver’, Albon’s comments may have sounded striking. But drivers understand better than anyone how their performance is not a constant, how different car and track traits play differently to how they naturally drive.

It’s still not something automatically understood by the F1 fanbase at large; how it’s about way more than just how competitive the car is. It’s that as well of course, but it’s also about how well its traits allow a particular driver to access his own strengths. If a driver has a brilliant ability to induce fast rotation upon corner entry without it costing time on the exit through scrub — an ability that might buy him two- or three-tenths of lap time over a team-mate in the right car — it will count for nothing if the car just has too much understeer.

The team-mate without that strength might have superior traction feel and if the car has a traction shortfall, he might be consistently quicker in that understeery, low-traction car than the supposed ace who would annihilate him in a sharp-turning car with better traction. This can even manifest differently from one track to the next in the same car, or between one tyre compound and another, one track surface temperature and another, one braking demand and another. Comparison between team-mates is never a constant.

After Hamilton’s win on Sunday, the man who was obliged to stand aside for him at Ferrari, Carlos Sainz, expounded further. “You go to a team with a car you don’t like, you seem like a one-armed man. You go to a team with a car to your liking and you seem like a god.”

But this is mixed up with all sorts of other questions, and in that ambiguity, doubts can multiply, questions will arise inside the driver’s mind like, ‘Am I too old?’ It’s not only the outside world which has it doubts. Because it’s not a science. There’s too much of a data gap between the telemetry and the personal physiology for it to be that. “After a year like last year, there were definitely moments that I was like, ‘sheesh, maybe it is true that when you get to a certain point, you lose it,’” said Hamilton last weekend.

The psychological effect of those questions can further degrade performance. “I am just remembering who I am,” he said recently. “Last year I sometimes forgot who I was.” It may sound egotistical but ego is an essential ingredient to a driver’s performance. The loss of performance compounds through the effect on the ego.

There are reasons why this Ferrari is far better suited to Hamilton than last year’s. Some are to do with the change in technical regulations, others are a direct result of changes he pushed for inside the team to do with his personal preferences. Without both those sets of changes happening together, we likely wouldn’t be seeing the Hamilton which prevailed on Sunday.

As we’ve discussed here before, the ground effect regulations 2022-25 made for a type of car intrinsically unsuited to Hamilton’s natural way of hustling a car. His super-hard braking brought too much disruption to an aero platform which needed to be almost totally flat to give its best. That brought all sorts of spiralling set-up problems for him. That’s all gone now. The regulations have given softer, more compliant cars which work best with some dive and pitch.

The changes he’s been pushing for internally almost since the moment he arrived at Ferrari have been challenging to achieve and team boss Frederic Vasseur must take much of the credit in them having been achieved. The headline change has been to the brakes. Politically, switching Hamilton’s car from the discs of long-standing Ferrari partners Brembo to those of Carbone Industrie has caused ructions through the organisation. It’s not a case of one make being better than another, just different. The friction coefficient of the CIs gives very powerful stopping power. The Brembos have a more progressive grading of feel through the pedal. Hamilton, with his hard late braking, doesn’t need the graded feedback; he has great sensitivity in his left foot. He just needs the power to brake as hard as he wants, doesn’t want to have a lower ceiling of deceleration imposed upon him by a more forgiving disc.

Furthermore, he hated the way Ferrari had developed engine braking as a way of aiding corner rotation. The whole set-up and aerodynamic philosophy of the car was based around that. “When I was at McLaren with Lewis,” recalled Heikki Kovalainen, “he hated engine braking. In fact, he’d sometimes have negative engine braking.” Heavy engine braking combined with Hamilton’s aggressive entry approach just made for rear instability.

So the changes which needed to be made internally to give Hamilton a ’26 car which worked with him and not against, were big. They involved every department. It can be imagined that there was some internal friction as they had to change their established methodologies and philosophies. Vasseur’s faith was surely being tested. He was making these deep sweeping changes, getting the engineers to buy into Hamilton’s vision, for a driver who was under-performing, consistently slower than his team-mate. Vasseur would know his own performance as a team boss was going to be judged on this in a notoriously volatile environment too. “Fred is the one who made this happen,” said Hamilton after the race, “for which I’m incredibly grateful to him. I think last year was really, really tough for him to deal with.”

It’s not that Hamilton is some latter-day Jack Brabham driver-engineer coming in and seeing what others cannot, seeing things that Leclerc, for instance, could not. He wasn’t saying, ‘This is how you make the changes’ but simply, ‘These are the changes in the car’s traits I need to perform for you’. They were all to do with driving style, not some god-like vision. But his enormous stature as a seven-time world champion brings a huge power to those requests.