Ferrari thought Lewis Hamilton would slip into Maranello like a tailored red suit. Turns out, the fit needed a few alterations.
Team boss Fred Vasseur has owned up to it. He and Hamilton “underestimated” just how different life would be after 18 years in the Mercedes orbit, first at McLaren and then the works team. Ferrari isn’t Mercedes, culturally or technically, and Hamilton’s first season in red has made that abundantly clear.
The seven-time champion shocked the paddock by signing for 2025, arriving at 40 and sampling a non‑Mercedes power unit for the first time. It’s been more grind than glory. At the summer break he trailed Charles Leclerc by 42 points, hadn’t seen a podium, while Leclerc had five. That’s not the headline Ferrari—or Hamilton—imagined.
Vasseur drew a pointed comparison to the man Hamilton replaced. Carlos Sainz, now at Williams for 2025, is a serial team-switcher who knows how to fast-track his bearings. Hamilton, by contrast, moved teams once in his entire F1 career before this—and stayed within the same technical family. “We thought he’d have everything under control,” Vasseur admitted to Auto Motor und Sport, before conceding Ferrari had been naive about the scale of the switch.
According to Vasseur, it took “four to five races” for Hamilton to get on top of the basics at Ferrari. Since Montreal, the team reckons the trajectory has been upward. Then Budapest happened: Hamilton fell in Q2 while Leclerc stuck it on pole, tossed out a barbed “change driver” line on the radio, and later called himself “useless.” He also hinted at “background” issues that “weren’t great.”
Ferrari’s reaction? Don’t flinch. “Stay calm,” says Vasseur. Hamilton’s extremes—hard on himself one day, hard on the car the next—are part of the package. Vasseur insists the public severity softens once he’s back in the briefing room. He wants everything, from everyone, all the time. The boss can live with that. He’s seen it before, he notes, thinking back to a young Nico Hülkenberg under his watch in junior formulas: relentless demands matched by relentless commitment.
So where does that leave Ferrari’s biggest signing in a decade? With a longer game to play. Hamilton’s multi-year deal plants him squarely in the frame for 2026’s regulation reset—the clean sheet that could hand him a last, best shot at number eight. In the meantime, Ferrari believes the pieces are finally aligning: the acclimatisation, the language (literal and technical), the race-by-race understanding of how this car wants to be driven.
It hasn’t been seamless. It rarely is at Maranello. But the team senses the slow burn is starting to take. The second half of the season will tell us whether Hamilton’s red suit is ready for the spotlight—or still at the tailor for final tweaks.
