Hamilton’s first Ferrari season ended with ‘anger and rage’. His F1 rivals should be worried

Lewis Hamilton says he’s feeling better than he has in years as he attempts to bury the disappointment of his maiden campaign with Ferrari.

Hamilton’s Ferrari switch was the biggest talking point ahead of 2025, but the Englishman failed to live up to his seven-time champion status.

Teammate Charles Leclerc comfortably led the team on every important metric, with Hamilton finishing a dispiriting 96 points behind him in the final tally.

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The Briton struggled to adapt to the car, and his adjustment to life inside Ferrari was at times jarring, with his awkward radio exchanges with former race engineer Riccardo Adami a window into the difficulty he and the team had gelling together.

He ended the season harbouring “an unbearable amount of anger and rage” following three successive Q1 exits to close the season — a far cry from the giddy excitement of seeing himself wearing Ferrari’s famous colour for the first time around a year earlier.

But the tough lessons of 2025, plus an off-season disconnected from the paddock, has Hamilton feeling better prepared than ever for a new season.

“I think I always try to enter into a season with confidence, but of course you’re faced with all sorts of different challenges along the way,” he said during testing. “I’ve obviously gone through quite a bit, and all of last year is behind me.

“I really felt I spent a lot of time rebuilding over this winter, refocusing, really getting my body and my mind into a much better place — in general, just making sure that I’m able to arrive feeling better.

“I generally feel personally in the best place that I’ve been in a long, long time, with rearranging things within my team.”

Hamilton’s Ferrari move was always targeted at success in 2026, but the team’s unexpectedly close second-place finish behind McLaren in the 2024 constructors championship raised expectations beyond the realm of reality.

Last year’s car was far weaker and less predictable than its predecessor, and team boss Fred Vasseur later admitted that Ferrari had switched off development very early in the year, cutting its losses and focusing on the challenge of 2026 instead.

It reframes Hamilton’s tough first season as essential learning ahead of his examination this year.

“It’s definitely been a challenge, and one that I’ve enjoyed for the most part,” he said. “I think, having had a year now with the team, everything is much more settled — the ins and outs of the working relationship.

“I’m really, really excited about this season. I think everyone’s really showed up with really great positivity. Even at the end of the last year, just the empathy within the team, the hunger, you could see as I travelled around the workshop to go and see people before Christmas, and then to see them show up this year, it’s a really positive feeling so far.”

‘MY DNA IS WITHIN IT’

The added advantage of coming into this season — featuring all-new rules — with a year at Ferrari already under his belt is that he’s been able to influence the team’s development program for the first time.

He found last year’s Ferrari to be a poor match for his driving style after more than a decade racing for Mercedes. Combined with his general distaste for the ground-effect regulations, he was rarely a match for Leclerc.

Ferrari too, however, shares some blame. The car was clearly a step backwards year on year, the team having taken a gamble on some significant changes before putting the 2025 cue in the rack.

There was also the matter of the team supposedly not listening to some of his feedback. Hamilton’s title-winning experience could put the finishing touches on Ferrari’s long-awaited championship comeback, but reports suggest some factions inside Maranello resented being told to do things differently.

Hamilton went into the off-season break emphasising the need for serious changes behind the scenes. He’s returned sounding far more optimistic that car and team are in better shape to fight at the front.

“With the car, we’ve started off quite well so far,” he said. “It’s an exciting time with this new generation of car as well, because it’s all brand new — we’re all trying to figure it out on the go.

“Last year we were locked into a car that ultimately I inherited. This is a car that I’ve been able to be a part of developing on the simulator for the last 10 months, eight months, so a bit of my DNA is within it, so I’m more connected to this one, for sure.

“My belief in the team is still absolutely the same — 100 per cent faith in this team and what they’re capable of, and that’s why I joined the team.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be an overnight thing, that we’d have success immediately. That’s why I signed a longer deal, because I knew more often than not it’s a process.

“I feel like we’ve also learned a huge amount from last year as a team, and there have been changes that we’ve made.

“Everyone’s constantly keen to make improvements and be better, so I think we’re working better together than ever before. I’m excited for that.”

This generation of car also appears better suited to Hamilton. Despite the myriad intricacies of this complex new chassis and engine formula, the general aerodynamic philosophy of the car is much more closely aligned with the prevalent ideology of the Briton’s title-winning era, with ground effect banished from the sport.

“I think the cars are more fun to drive, to be honest,” he said. “They’re easier to correct, so you have snaps and keep it on track. The previous year’s cars were just a bit too on edge.

“We have a less downforce, but you still have to discover the grip, you still have to utilise the grip. There are still so many elements completely under our control.

“It’s just different and new, and I still find it quite fun.”

HAMILTON SET FOR NEW ENGINEER

One of the most notable changes from the outside will be to Hamilton’s race engineer.

His and Adami’s sometimes tense, sometimes comical communication became a major talking point through the year.

Both Hamilton and team boss Vasseur denied there was any issue in the driver-engineer working relationship, arguing that they were new to each other and would take time to find a mutual wavelength.

In January, however, the team announced that Adami would shift from the pit wall and instead take up a role with Ferrari’s young driver academy.

A permanent replacement has yet to be announced, but for the early stage of the season Hamilton will work with long-time Ferrari engineer Carlo Santi.

Santi was Kimi Räikkönen’s race engineer in 2018, during the Finn’s second stint at the team. He had been Räikkönen’s performance engineer in the years before that.

After Räikkönen left the team at the end of 2018, Santi moved to a factory-based role heading up the team’s remote race operations centre.

“With Riccardo, it was a pretty difficult decision to make,” Hamilton said, per the F1 website. “I’m really, really grateful for all the effort he put in last year and his patience. It was a difficult year for us all.

“It’s actually quite a difficult era, because it’s not long term, the solution that I currently have; it’s only a few races, and so early on in the season it’s going to all be switching up again and I’ll have to learn to work with someone new.

“That’s detrimental for me too, [going into] a season where you want to arrive with people that have done multiple seasons, that have been through thick and thin, and I can’t.

“But it is the situation that I’m faced with, and I’ll try and do the best that I can. The team is trying to do the best they can to make it as seamless as possible.”

The identity of Adami’s long-term replacement is unknown, but rumours heavily link the role to Oscar Piastri’s former lead trackside performance engineer, Cédric Michel-Grosjean.

Michel-Grosjean left McLaren at the end of last season but would likely have had a months-long non-compete period as part of his contract given his seniority.

Despite the significant interest in the change, team boss Vasseur said a single person wouldn’t make or break Hamilton’s Ferrari tenure.

“The team today is something like 1500 people,” he said, per Planet F1. “It’s not about one race engineer.

“The guy that you see on the pit wall is leading a team of people working on the car, and it’s not a matter of individuals.

“In F1 it’s always about the team. It’s never about an individual.”

Hamilton, however, is one of the individuals with the capacity to make a difference on his own.

We’ll find out soon whether he has all the pieces in place to do so.