Lewis Hamilton didn’t try to pretend 2025 at Ferrari was anything other than bruising. In Melbourne on Thursday, he spoke like a driver who’s spent a winter not just working through set-up sheets and simulator runs, but taking a hard look at why his first year in red got away from him so quickly — and what he’s changed to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
He arrived at Ferrari as the headline move of the previous season, only to endure the most anonymous campaign of his career. No podiums. A run of four straight Q1 exits to close the year. Outqualified and outscored by Charles Leclerc by a distance that, for a seven-time champion, would’ve felt less like a statistic and more like an alarm bell.
Hamilton referenced a social media post from last month in which he admitted he’d “forgot who he was” during the grind of 2025. The key line, though, was the one he repeated in person: that version of him is gone.
“I think the break was really positive,” Hamilton said. “It was my surroundings, it was the people that I was with. It’s not my first rodeo, so it’s understanding how to flip things… I always talk about cultivating a positive mental attitude and that’s what I focus on the winter doing.
“A lot of it came from training, so I was training hard from Christmas day. Also knowing that I believe in myself and I’ve put more work in than anyone around me.
“Rediscovering myself was really a big part of it… I kind of lost sight for a second of who I was and that person’s gone, so you won’t see that person again.”
For an F1 audience that’s watched Hamilton at his peak, the interesting part isn’t the motivational framing — he’s always been comfortable talking about mindset — it’s the subtext: 2025 wasn’t just a bad car, bad luck, or bad fit. It was a season where the usual Hamilton tools didn’t cut through whatever was happening inside the team, inside the cockpit, and inside his own head.
This week, he’s pushing a different story. Not a miraculous reinvention, but something closer to a reset: sharper habits, clearer communication, and a more stable working environment around him.
He described changes “within my own personal space” and in how he interacts with Ferrari, and he leaned heavily on the idea that year two is about fluency — in culture, in process, in the small, daily mechanics of how a driver actually gets performance out of a huge organisation.
“Massively,” Hamilton said when asked how different he feels heading into his second season. “A much nicer feeling coming having spent a year at the team, understanding the culture, understanding ways, finding ways of working together. I feel very gelled with the team today, so much happier.
“It’s the culture, the difference in culture… compared to what I’ve experienced with British teams, for example. And I think it’s really just getting to know each other. Lots of meetings, lots of discussions, lots of communication.”
There was also a telling admission about how change works at Ferrari — that it isn’t enough to demand it, you have to build buy-in.
“Just asking for change is one thing, but finding ways to create allyship and show that why change is better for us as a whole… going on the journey together,” he said. “We have started to do that towards the end of last year and particularly going into this season.
“We were kind of learning on the go. But I think we are so much more prepared this year.”
That word — prepared — is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Hamilton isn’t just talking about his own winter. He’s making the case that Ferrari, as a group, has steadied itself for 2026. With the new rules and regulations now in play, everyone’s rewriting their playbook. For a driver coming off a year of low confidence moments, that’s either a gift or a trap: a clean slate, or another layer of uncertainty.
Hamilton insisted he isn’t framing it as a confidence issue.
“I would say it’s not a confidence thing,” he said. “We got great mileage done in winter testing… We’ve learned a lot from last year. We’re leaving behind the bad and moving forward with the good.
“I think we’re just sharp. Prepared and we know what we need to do. We also know there’s massive challenges for all of us with the new rules and regulations.”
The competitive picture, at least from Hamilton’s perspective, is still blurred. He named Mercedes as “particularly quick” and suggested there might be more to come from Red Bull once it’s “unleashed”. That reads like the standard early-season caution, but it also reflects where Ferrari finds itself: optimistic after pre-season work with the SF-26, but not yet in a position to dictate the terms.
As for objectives, Hamilton didn’t dress it up.
“The goal is to win,” he said. “To maximise on every opportunity… to be hopefully fighting in the top group in the first races.”
If 2025 was about surviving a steep learning curve — and, at times, being swallowed by it — then 2026 is being pitched as something far more deliberate: Hamilton arriving at a new era of the sport with a better grasp of Ferrari, and Ferrari with a better grasp of Hamilton. That doesn’t guarantee trophies. But it does make one thing clear ahead of Australia: he’s done with merely enduring life in red.
