Lewis Hamilton isn’t pretending a few encouraging test days automatically rewrite the competitive order. But in Bahrain this week, the way he talked about Ferrari’s new SF-26 hinted at something more fundamental than lap times: for the first time in a while, he sounds like he’s driving a car that feels like it belongs to him.
“More connected” was the phrase Hamilton kept coming back to, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Last year ended in a personal oddity for a seven-time champion — a full season without a podium for the first time in his F1 career — and it clearly sharpened his appetite for a clean reset. The 2026 rules reset has handed him one, and Ferrari’s willingness to let him influence the direction of the project has, in his words, put “a bit of my DNA within it”.
That’s not just a nice quote. In modern F1, where drivers are often dropped into a concept that’s been set long before they’ve even turned a wheel, “connection” is typically shorthand for something more technical: the car responding predictably to inputs, giving confidence on entry, letting the driver lean on it without second-guessing where the limit is. Hamilton framed it in those terms, contrasting last year’s package — a car he said he “inherited” — with the SF-26, which he’s been living with on the simulator for the past 10 months.
“It’s all brand new,” Hamilton said in Bahrain. “We’re all trying to figure it out on the go… as where 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… so a bit of my DNA is within it. I’m more connected to this one.”
Ferrari’s early running has, at the very least, helped the mood. The team has banked plenty of mileage through its Barcelona shakedown and the opening phases of the Bahrain test, with the new power unit behaving itself and the SF-26 frequently loitering near the top of the timing screens. Nobody in the paddock needs the reminder that testing leaderboards are a hall of mirrors, but reliability always matters in the first week of a new era. If you can’t run, you can’t learn — and Ferrari, so far, has been learning.
What’s also changed is the scaffolding around Hamilton. Over the winter he has reshaped his personal set-up, parting ways with long-time manager Marc Hynes, who has moved into a role with Cadillac. Inside Ferrari, there’s been upheaval too: Riccardo Adami has been moved to a different position, leaving Hamilton to begin the season with a temporary race engineer arrangement. In isolation, that sounds like the kind of disruption that can derail a pre-season. Hamilton, though, described it as part of a broader rebuild — more deliberate than chaotic.
“I spent a lot of time rebuilding over this winter, refocusing, really getting my body and my mind to a much better place,” he said. “In general, just making sure that I’m able to arrive feeling better now… with rearranging things within my team.”
There was a telling moment when he was asked whether this is the most confident he’s felt in the past five years. Hamilton didn’t bite, which is rarely an accident. But he did point to one thing that does speak loudly in F1: contract length. Hamilton has committed to Ferrari for the longer haul, and he was candid about why. He isn’t selling anyone a fairytale about instant gratification, and he’s not pretending the first race of a new rules cycle is a coronation.
“My belief in the team is still absolutely the same — 100% faith in this team and what they’re capable of,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be an overnight thing where we’d have success immediately. That’s why I signed a longer deal, because I knew, more often than not, it’s a process.”
That line lands because it matches what’s visible from the outside. Ferrari has spent years trying to turn pace into titles, often looking fast enough to win races but not consistently sharp enough to win the war. The 2026 reset offers opportunity, but it also punishes teams that chase perfection too quickly and end up painting themselves into a development corner. Hamilton seems to be pitching himself internally not as a quick fix, but as a long-game asset — a driver who wants to help shape the machine as much as he wants to race it.
He also hinted that Ferrari has already taken lessons from 2025 into the SF-26 programme, describing “changes that we’ve made” and a sense that the team is “working better together than ever before.” It’s the kind of line every driver delivers at some point in February, but the difference here is that Hamilton’s optimism didn’t feel like it was aimed at the cameras. It sounded like a man trying to convince himself as much as anyone else — which is usually where the honest stuff lives.
None of this guarantees that Ferrari has nailed the regulation shift, or that Hamilton has found a second peak at 41. But there’s a clearer logic to the story he’s telling now than there was at points last season. The car is new, the ground rules are new, and Hamilton finally has a Ferrari he can claim he helped to create.
In a year where so many teams and drivers are starting from scratch, that sense of ownership might matter more than any flattering test headline.
