Ferrari has opened 2026 doing what Ferrari always does when the lights are still off: projecting certainty.
Lewis Hamilton’s comments after the Barcelona shakedown landed exactly where Maranello likes them — upbeat, unequivocal, drenched in that familiar suggestion that the pieces are finally in place. “Everyone’s really on it,” he said, after topping the day. “I really feel the winning mentality… Everyone’s positive and incredibly enthusiastic.”
If you’ve followed this team for more than five minutes, you know why those words both excite and itch. The Tifosi have lived through enough springtime declarations to hear the tiny alarm bell underneath the applause. Ferrari’s last Drivers’ Championship remains Kimi Räikkönen’s in 2007, and the intervening years have taught supporters to treat optimism like a fragile thing: nice to hold, dangerous to rely on.
Alex Brundle’s take cuts to the heart of why that dynamic never really changes. In his view, Ferrari isn’t simply a racing team that happens to be publicly bullish — it’s a brand built on the refusal to speak any other language.
Put bluntly, the idea of Ferrari ever “talking down” its prospects doesn’t exist. Not because it’s strategically unwise, but because it’s culturally impossible. Brundle argues that what Enzo Ferrari set in motion wasn’t just an organisation but an identity: win or nothing, racing first, everything else as an afterthought.
And there’s the rub. That posture can be intoxicating when the car is quick, but it can also become a trap when reality bites. In a sport where marginal deficits snowball into weekends lost and points hemorrhaged, the inability to acknowledge limitation — even internally, even temporarily — risks turning normal pressure into self-inflicted strain.
Hamilton knows what that feels like. The fanfare around his arrival from Mercedes didn’t translate into the instant transformation so many expected, and Brundle’s diagnosis for why 2025 never quite caught fire is telling because it doesn’t lean on easy explanations. Yes, the hype was enormous. Yes, it weighed. But the bigger issue, he suggests, was a more awkward mix of car traits and organisational habit.
Hamilton, at his best, has long been a driver who wants to manhandle the car — to “pick it up by the scruff of the neck,” as Brundle put it — with a rear end that can move and rotate underneath him. The previous generation of cars, in Brundle’s view, simply didn’t lean into that instinct. Add to that the reality that Ferrari has its own way of doing things, its own processes and assumptions on setup direction and development priorities, and you have a seven-time champion arriving not as an all-powerful saviour but as a newcomer who still has to translate his strengths into a different dialect.
Brundle framed it with an old motorsport truth often credited to Ron Dennis: past performance buys you respect, not results. Hamilton’s record remains historic, but the stopwatch doesn’t do nostalgia — and neither do the politics of performance inside a team that has its own gravitational pull.
The most interesting part of Brundle’s assessment is how quickly a small disadvantage can mutate into a larger one at Ferrari. When the expectation is permanently set to “we will win,” any early wobble can trigger the very human tendency to overreach. Engineers push a little harder for the magic fix. Drivers try to manufacture lap time. Small mistakes become big ones. Nobody will admit panic — not publicly, maybe not even to themselves — but the atmosphere changes all the same.
That’s why 2026 matters in a way Ferrari can’t really hide from. Formula 1 has moved on from the ground-effect era to a different aerodynamic philosophy, with cars that are shorter and lighter, and with movable front and rear wings now part of the picture. New rules don’t guarantee a reset — teams carry momentum, infrastructure, and competence across eras — but they do rearrange what “strength” looks like. They also reshuffle whose driving preferences align naturally with the platform.
Brundle believes this is the opening Hamilton needed. Not just because regulation change can play to his instincts, but because Hamilton brings something Ferrari has occasionally lacked during its more chaotic stretches: an unusually deep technical feel, and the credibility to steer development without turning every discussion into a referendum on leadership.
If Ferrari’s 2026 engine is genuinely strong — and the team certainly wants you to believe it is — then Hamilton’s opportunity is obvious. He’s chasing an eighth title that would stand alone, and he’s doing it with the one team whose mythology can amplify a comeback into something bigger than a sporting story.
But that mythology cuts both ways. Ferrari’s strength is its unshakeable belief; its weakness is that belief can curdle into inflexibility. The early tone of this season suggests the message from inside Maranello will remain relentlessly positive, because it always is. The question is whether, this time, the team can pair that outward confidence with the quieter, harder skill that champions rely on: admitting what isn’t working quickly enough to fix it.
Hamilton has heard the promises before. Ferrari has made them for decades. Now they’ve got a new set of rules, a new car concept, and the most decorated driver of his generation insisting he can feel “winning mentality” in the building.
In February, that’s easy to say. In May, when the first proper storms roll in, we’ll find out whether Ferrari’s optimism is a shield — or a blindfold.
