Lewis Hamilton doesn’t sound like a man banking on luck in Miami. If the threatened Sunday thunderstorms roll over the circuit, he believes he’ll arrive better armed than most — not because of some mystical “rain master” reputation, but because Ferrari has quietly piled up an unusual amount of wet running with the SF-26.
“I’ve definitely done more wet testing than probably ever before,” Hamilton said in Miami. “I mean, I had a whole day in Barcelona, which was not fun, and then I had two days of wet testing two weeks ago.”
Those two days came at Fiorano on a Pirelli wet tyre programme, the sort of unglamorous, grind-it-out track time that rarely makes a highlight reel but can pay off when a race weekend gets weird. Hamilton’s point was simple: in a season where these new-generation cars remain a moving target in low-grip conditions, he’s already had to do the hard yards.
“And so that hopefully puts me in a decent position if it rains on Sunday,” he added. “It could be interesting, but the car doesn’t feel too bad in the rain.”
Ferrari has kept itself busy through the April break. There was a filming day at Monza — and, inevitably, the internet did what it always does when it spots something unusual on a red car. Fan footage picked up Ferrari running its rotating rear wing, the same solution last seen earlier in the season. Hamilton was quick to downplay any notion that Monza running offered meaningful clues.
“I didn’t learn anything at Monza, because it’s a filming day,” he said.
What’s more relevant for Miami is that Ferrari has been hinting at a sizeable upgrade — described internally as a “package and a half” — but Hamilton’s attention on Thursday was pulled towards the most volatile variable of the weekend: weather, and what it does to the already unconventional competitive picture in 2026.
He didn’t just talk about the experience as a driver, either. The Fiorano running gave him a direct line into Pirelli’s current wet tyre direction, and Hamilton made the case that the sport still hasn’t nailed the fundamentals when the track gets saturated.
“It was good to be able to work with Pirelli and have a conversation with them on how we can improve the tyre,” he said. “Because in general, the drivers do complain a lot about the tyres and the grip that we have, and we always want to be improving.
“We used to be able to have some great races in the rain.”
That last line carried a little bite. It’s not nostalgia for the sake of it; it’s a reminder that wet races used to reward judgement, touch and timing in a way that felt more straightforward. With the current cars, even Ferrari’s own drivers are flagging that the wet may produce its own brand of danger — not necessarily in the corners, but in the places you don’t want surprises: the ends of straights, in poor visibility, with mixed strategies and different power deployment.
Charles Leclerc put it bluntly. The counter-intuitive quirk of these cars, he said, is that they can actually arrive at the end of a straight *faster* in wet conditions than in the dry, because there’s less need to manage energy in the same way.
“You have a lot of electrical power,” Leclerc explained. “And I think the weird thing about these cars in the wet is that you might end up going much faster at the end of the straight in wet conditions than you do in the dry conditions, because you don’t have that engine cut, because you’re not using as much energy.
“So you might have less cut in the straights, and arrive faster at the end of the straight. So that’s a little bit strange and counter intuitive.”
In isolation, that sounds like a neat technical footnote. In traffic, it starts to sound like a recipe for misreads. Faster closing speeds, different power unit strategies, minimal spray visibility — and suddenly the classic wet-weather calculus changes. Leclerc said the SF-26 feels “quite nice” in the corners because it’s light, but he’s more uneasy about the straight-line chaos.
“In the straight, you can find yourself in tricky situations, especially if drivers are driving with different power unit strategies. You’ve got very little visibility,” he said. “So that’s the trickiness of these rules, and something that we need to understand a way out of that.”
Leclerc’s most striking admission was about what “commitment” looks like now. In the wet, bravery doesn’t present itself the way it used to; the cars encourage a more binary approach.
“Because in the wet, we are really passengers,” he said. “In the rain, it’s not about being brave or not. It’s you stay flat out and you hope that no cars in front of you are slower than you, and you just assume they are on the same speed as you… Now it’s not the case anymore.
“So we will go flat out and let’s see how it goes. It’s not such a nice feeling. So this is something we need to still work a way around that.”
That, more than anything, is the subtext hanging over Miami if the forecast hits: the sport’s new technical era hasn’t just reshuffled the pecking order, it’s altered the risk profile in the wet. Hamilton’s extra days of rain testing might help him feel where the limit lives on full wets and intermediates, and it might help Ferrari tune its baseline. But it won’t change the bigger truth Leclerc is getting at — that in 2026, the most uncomfortable moments in heavy rain may come when you’re not turning the wheel at all.
If Sunday turns into a storm-soaked game of chicken down Miami’s longest straights, Hamilton’s preparation could still matter. Not because it makes the situation safe, but because it might make it fractionally more predictable — and in modern F1 rain races, predictability is about as valuable as outright pace.
