Lewis Hamilton doesn’t need reminding that his first season in red didn’t go to plan. No podiums, no grand prix wins for Ferrari, and the sort of muted Sundays that felt alien for a driver who’s spent most of his career dictating the rhythm at the front.
But if there’s one thing Hamilton has always been good at, it’s treating a bad year as a trigger rather than a verdict. And with Formula 1’s full reset for 2026 — new chassis rules, new power unit architecture, the whole sport effectively hitting refresh — the timing couldn’t be cleaner for Ferrari’s biggest gamble in a generation to start looking like a masterstroke.
There’s an unlikely voice backing that idea: Usain Bolt. The Olympic legend has followed Hamilton for years, and he’s framed the challenge in terms elite athletes immediately recognise. When you’ve already lived at the summit, the route back isn’t a mystery — it’s just brutally hard.
“For me, it’s always going to be tough,” Bolt said in quotes carried by RacingNews365. “But as a person who knows what it takes to get to the top, it’s never going to be perfect.
“It’s much easier to get back to the top, because you know the work, and you know what you need to do to get back on top.”
Bolt’s point is simple: Hamilton’s not searching for a version of himself he’s never met. He’s trying to reconnect with habits and standards that have delivered seven world titles — and do it inside Ferrari, a team that can be intoxicating when it’s humming and suffocating when it isn’t.
That’s where 2026 becomes more than a technical opportunity. It’s a cultural one. Hamilton has already talked up the new cars as “more enjoyable” to drive, and he’s spoken about sensing a “winning mentality” at Maranello. Those are loaded phrases from a driver who’s spent a career sniffing out when an operation is aligned and when it’s just talking about being aligned.
The early paddock noise has been predictable: a quick lap in a closed-doors Barcelona shakedown — Hamilton topping unofficial timesheets — instantly became catnip. But even without over-reading a private test day, it does fit the broader picture of a driver who looks energised by the clean-sheet feel of the new era. It’s easier to be optimistic when nobody has a reference point yet; it’s also easier to drive with conviction when the car’s behaviour is at least speaking your language.
Bolt, for his part, doesn’t expect fireworks overnight — and that might be the most realistic part of his assessment. Ferrari is a different ecosystem to the one Hamilton left. The language, the routines, the internal politics, the way pressure travels through the building… none of it is plug-and-play, even for Hamilton.
“It’s going to take him at least two years to really get comfortable, settle in, and get used to Ferrari,” Bolt said. “So I look forward to the upcoming years; he’s going to really show up again.”
Two years is an eternity in modern F1, but it’s also a telling acknowledgement that Hamilton’s Ferrari chapter was never going to be a one-season project. 2025, for all the hype, was always likely to be the messy part: learning how Ferrari works, and learning how to influence it. The highlights were thin — the China Sprint win standing out as the one proper moment where Hamilton and Ferrari looked like they belonged together — but it did at least show the ceiling exists when the pieces line up.
Now Hamilton’s trying to sharpen the edges around him as well as the car beneath him. He’s split with long-time manager Marc Hynes ahead of the 2026 campaign, and he’s also set to work with a new race engineer. Those aren’t cosmetic tweaks. They’re the sort of changes drivers make when they’re stripping away anything that doesn’t serve the central mission.
And that mission is obvious: an eighth world championship, and ending Ferrari’s title drought that’s stretched back to 2008. The romance of that storyline is why the move landed with such force in 2025. The reality is that romance doesn’t move lap time — clarity does. The best version of Hamilton has always been the one with a tight circle, a clear message in his ear, and a car he trusts on the limit.
There’s also a subtler point in Bolt’s confidence. For athletes at that level, there’s a difference between losing your ability and losing your momentum. Hamilton’s 2025 didn’t read like a driver suddenly out of ideas; it read like a driver living in the grey zone — close enough to believe, not close enough to cash in. That’s a frustrating place because it tempts you into overdriving the situation: pushing too hard, searching too aggressively, turning every weekend into a referendum.
If Ferrari’s 2026 package is genuinely competitive, Hamilton won’t need to manufacture anything. He’ll just need to be Hamilton again — decisive on set-up direction, ruthless in execution, and calm enough to let the season come to him.
Bolt is waiting for that moment.
“I look forward to the moment when he gets back on top,” he said, “because… he knows what it takes to get there and to stay there.”
F1’s new era will expose plenty of big names. For Hamilton, it offers something rarer: a clean environment to rebuild the narrative on his own terms. Whether Ferrari can match the ambition is the only question that matters.
