The narrative was tempting to take up as Lewis Hamilton basked in the glory of victory at the Chinese Grand Prix — that the greatest of all time had taken two races to master his new Ferrari in the biggest team switch in the sport’s history.
The Briton had been flawless in the opening sessions of that weekend, taking pole and commanding the short race. At a track around which he’s always excelled, he looked back to his best.
But reality quickly set in even as the Shanghai crowd cheered him on.
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“Rome wasn’t built in one day,” he cautioned. “One step at a time.
“We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves — we cannot.”
How prescient those words seem now.
It’s all been downhill for Hamilton since that glorious Saturday session. He was disqualified from the grand prix the following day, and he spent the following three grands prix being pummelled by teammate Charles Leclerc.
The last of those beatings, in Saudi Arabia, was the most chastening. Outqualified by 0.531 seconds and finishing a distant seventh while Leclerc grabbed the team’s first podium, he despaired that there appeared to be no light at the end of the tunnel of his transition to the Ferrari car in the final year of these regulations.
Hamilton tends towards pessimism in his darkest moments. Sometimes it’s a motivational mechanism, with some of his best performances coming with his back against the wall.
But after having had a weekend off to digest his struggles, the seven-time champion’s mood appeared hardly lifted in the lead-up to this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, where his perfunctory responses contrasted starkly with his excited and verbose pre-season persona.
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What was stopping him from converting his glimpses of speed into meaningful consistency?
“Many things. Lots of different things. There’s not one particular,” he said.
Were you able to come up with any solutions back at the factory during the break?
“We went through a lot, did some good sim running,” he said. “There are things that we’ve made adjustments to. We’ll see how they work this weekend.”
What are you expecting this weekend?
“No clue. We’ll do the best we can,” he summed.
“We’ve not got upgrades or anything this weekend, but we continue to try and optimise the car.
“Obviously Charles in the last race did a fantastic job and showed what the car can do in a race, so the goal is to try to replicate that.”
Beyond being a glimpse into his stony mood, it was hardly revelatory.
But perhaps there is a reason for optimism this weekend.
Miami, just like China, is a sprint weekend, run to the same format that unexpectedly promoted Hamilton back to the very head of the field.
It’s an aberration that so far has defied explanation, though Hamilton’s attempt to talk through it — brief though his thoughts were — was at least a little illuminating.
“In the sprint race there’s not a huge amount of changes you make,” he said. “I think the one thing to take from it is that we didn’t make a lot of changes, if any, going from FP1 to quali, whereas on all the other weekends we’ve been tinkering with the car and making it worse.”
It’s commentary that sounds — perhaps alarmingly — similar to the post-mortem of Daniel Ricciardo’s career.
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THE PARALLELS WITH RICCIARDO
Ricciardo was considered a future champion during his five-year stint at Red Bull Racing. His reputation was further enhanced at the end of his two-year stint at Renault, where he scored podiums well beyond the capability of his machinery.
But his momentum was stopped dead by McLaren’s peculiar 2021 car that ultimately triggered his downfall.
In looking back at his time with Woking, Ricciardo suspected that his best results came when he was fresh to the car rather than pushed to overthink his problems.
“One thing I keep thinking back on is my very first qualifying with McLaren. I outqualified Lando,” he told the In the Fast Lane podcast. “We’d only had I think a day and a half of testing because it was three days across two drivers at the beginning of 2021.
“I still didn’t really know the car, and I don’t know how many times I outqualified him over the two years, but it wasn’t much.
“To have done it when I was probably just driving more off feel and instinct and a lack of knowledge about the car, that was actually probably when I was better off.
“That’s not a knock on anyone or anything, but it’s more like, ‘Did we just overanalyse our bad weekends and then just get caught up in a way where it was like, ‘Okay, we need to start driving like this or setting the car up like that’?
“At some point we would have got a little too deep and little too lost.”
Ricciardo spent his two years at McLaren tying himself in knots so significantly that his driving style was totally unrecognisable to his old teammates at Red Bull Racing when he eventually rejoined Milton Keynes as a reserve driver in 2023.
It took him extensive time in the simulator before he’d unpicked his bad habits and was able to begin rebuilding his confidence.
There’s an interesting parallel with Hamilton’s early struggles as he tries to adapt to the Ferrari car’s demands, so foreign after so long at Mercedes.
“You’re generally always [driving with] a mixture of the two [instinct and conscious process],” he said. “But I’m definitely working hard to adjust to this one for sure.
“When I joined Mercedes, the first six months were tough getting attuned to working with new people.
“Obviously the engineers I’m working with now are used to setting up a car for a different driver and a different driving style, and I’m used to driving a car with a different driving style, so it’s a combination of a bunch of different things.
“We’re working as hard as we can to shorten that, but it could be longer. Who knows?”
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WHY THE SPRINT COULD BE KEY
There’s one further interesting parallel — in equal parts hopeful and confounding — that Hamilton shares with Ricciardo.
Even in Ricciardo’s inconsistent RB stint, his best result came in circumstances similar to that mystifying first race in Bahrain.
His fourth-place finish in the Miami sprint last year was the best result of his post-McLaren career.
It was early in the season, but more to the point, the sprint format meant there was almost no practice time with which to try to hone the car — and end up down a set-up dead-end.
RB racing director Alan Permane said the team never found an explanation for the gap between that high point and Ricciardo’s general inconsistency for the rest of the season.
“I don’t know and he doesn’t either,” he told Autosport. “We sat down and talked, tried to figure it out. I was certainly worried that he was overthinking things — he was concerned about the tyres, that they couldn’t cope with the speed he would be asking of them.
“It felt like he was using his huge experience to second-guess things that potentially weren’t correct, because Yuki [Tsunoda] wasn’t and he was driving as quick as he could and it was working.
“That was a tough time, and then of course we went to Miami and Daniel put it fourth on the grid [for the sprint race] and you think, ‘Ah, it’s all clicked’. That was the Daniel I knew at Renault.
“You do that in the sprint on Saturday morning, then you go for [grand prix] qualifying in the afternoon and he’s 18th.
“It was a bit of a mystery, honestly.“
Overthinking his driving — rather than driving confidently on instinct — is what dogged Ricciardo’s post-Red Bull Racing career.
It’s far too early to judge Hamilton’s Ferrari stint after just five rounds, but the warning signs are there that he could be on a similar path.
He controlled the sprint in Shanghai during round 2 of the season, when he was still fresh to the car and when the single practice session of the sprint format meant there was no opportunity to get lost in the task of trying to finesse the car. He just had to get in and effectively make do with however this unpredictable Ferrari car rolled out of the garage.
If he can replicate that good form this weekend — not necessarily win but be a match for teammate Leclerc — then he could be another crucial step along the way to understanding his struggles.
Or perhaps, like Ricciardo, he’ll be just as mystified as to why he can’t replicate that kind of success.
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