Ferrari’s driver room is full of homework, not politics. Charles Leclerc has swatted away chatter that Lewis Hamilton’s stream of feedback could tilt the SF-25’s development away from him, insisting both drivers are steering the same course.
Hamilton has been open about the paperwork. After the opening races of his first Ferrari season, the seven-time champion compiled a lengthy document for Maranello. He followed it with two more during the break between Britain and Belgium, detailing areas he wants addressed. That level of input inevitably sparked the old fear: one superstar voice drowning out the other.
Leclerc isn’t buying it. “He’s preparing his points, I’m preparing my points,” he said, explaining that both drivers sit in the same “big meetings” to thrash through priorities with the team. The Monegasque repeated the line you’d expect from a united Ferrari: everyone’s aligned, “no stress whatsoever.”
The context matters. Hamilton, who holds F1’s records for poles, podiums and wins, hasn’t added to those numbers in his first 14 starts in red. Leclerc, by contrast, has banked five podiums and delivered both his and Ferrari’s first pole of the campaign in Hungary. When one side of the garage is adapting and the other is scoring, the development tug-of-war narrative writes itself.
There is substance behind Hamilton’s notes, too. As reported in Italy, one of his headline items is engine braking. Ferrari’s power unit behaves differently to what he lived with at Mercedes, and the braking “feel” on corner entry isn’t where he wants it. He’s even asked for visibility on Ferrari’s all-new 2026 power unit architecture to make sure the trait is engineered out early.
Leclerc sees value in that cross-pollination rather than a threat. A driver coming from a “very different culture” can spotlight blind spots, he said, and Hamilton’s been doing exactly that since race one. This isn’t some sudden pivot; it’s the normal back-and-forth of two top drivers trying to shape a car. The reason it sounds louder now is simply because Hamilton spoke about the documents in public.
Strip away the noise and the picture is straightforward: one driver chasing feel, the other converting weekends, both feeding the same development loop. If Ferrari are going to turn flashes of pace into something heavier in 2025, they’ll need both voices — and all those memos — pulling in tandem.
