Lewis Hamilton doesn’t sound like a man chasing reassurance. A week into 2026’s unofficial running, he’s talking instead about mood, standards and the kind of day-to-day relentlessness that tends to show up in the lap time long before it appears on a results sheet.
Ferrari left Barcelona with plenty of quiet confidence, even if nothing about the five-day private shakedown was designed for public consumption. The stopwatch numbers weren’t released, mileage figures weren’t formally published, and the media wasn’t there. And yet, as ever in modern F1, enough seeped out to sketch a picture: Hamilton was understood to have logged the quickest lap of the test, a 1:16.348 on soft tyres late on the final day, while Ferrari’s overall programme looked tidy and productive. Unofficially, the team was also said to have banked 442 laps across its permitted three days of running, second only to Mercedes.
That’s not something to hang a trophy on — Hamilton is the first to roll his eyes at that sort of winter narrative — but it does matter when it’s paired with what he’s actually emphasising. Not outright performance. Not “we’re fastest”. But a sense inside Maranello that the basics are being handled with less drama and more intent.
“It’s been a really enjoyable week, honestly,” Hamilton said, speaking to Formula 1’s official channels. The phrasing was telling: he didn’t reach for the grand declarations, but he didn’t hide the satisfaction either. He pointed to a winter of work on his own side and what Ferrari has changed operationally heading into this season.
The week itself didn’t unfold like a perfectly scripted test. Barcelona threw in a full wet day early on — hardly ideal when teams want repeatable conditions and clean comparisons — but Hamilton sounded almost grateful for it. Last year, he arrived at the first race weekend with effectively no wet-weather experience in the Ferrari, only encountering those conditions in the race itself, which he described as “very hard”. For a driver who’s built a career on being able to find grip where others simply don’t, it was still an unnecessary disadvantage. This time, he’s banked that learning in February rather than paying for it in points in March.
More significant, though, was what didn’t happen.
Ferrari’s last few seasons have had a habit of making even straightforward days feel complicated. Hamilton said the SF-26’s first proper week of running was largely free of interruptions: “Having consistency, not having problems… Of course, there’s always small things, but we didn’t really have any downtime moments.”
In winter testing, “no downtime” is a competitive advantage in plain sight. It means the car is fundamentally behaving, the procedures are working, and the engineers can spend time making it quicker rather than simply keeping it alive. Hamilton hinted at the caveat — issues can always appear once you start pushing the envelope — but the subtext was clear: Ferrari’s foundation is firmer than it was a year ago.
Where this gets interesting is the way Hamilton framed the team’s mindset. He’s now heading into his second season in red after what he called a “very disappointing 2025” for both driver and team, and he’s openly feeding off something he feels in the building.
“I really feel the winning mentality, like in every single person in the team, more than ever,” he said. That’s a heavy phrase at Ferrari. Lots of people talk about “winning mentality” because it sounds nice; at Maranello it’s more complicated, because the pressure is constant and the noise around the team can be deafening. When a seven-time world champion chooses those words, it’s not just about motivation posters and optimistic debriefs. It’s about whether the team’s internal rhythm is sharp enough to survive the season’s inevitable rough patches.
Hamilton also sounded acutely aware of the bigger picture: everybody’s brought new machinery, everybody’s had winter to reset, and nobody is showing their hand properly in a closed test. He referenced Mercedes’ strong running, and noted that Red Bull and Haas also appeared to have productive programmes. Ferrari can feel good about itself and still be wrong about where it stands — an important distinction in a year where the competitive order will be defined by how quickly teams understand their new packages and how aggressively they can develop them.
“So we don’t really know where we are,” Hamilton admitted, before stressing the obvious but essential point: “Development is going to be key.”
This is the part of the pre-season that matters more than the unofficial headline time. Ferrari’s Barcelona week, by Hamilton’s account, was about credible execution — steady mileage, useful conditions, clean feedback loops and “great debriefs”. That’s the scaffolding you need before you start making the big performance calls, the ones that can win you races or waste months.
Next comes the public phase. The first official pre-season test runs in Bahrain from 11-13 February, followed by a second Bahrain outing from 18-20 February, before the season begins in Melbourne on 8 March. That’s when we’ll start to see whether Ferrari’s “new energy” translates into the only language F1 ultimately respects: pace over a stint, under fuel, with the clock ticking and the tyres going away.
For now, Hamilton sounds less like he’s selling a story and more like he’s describing a workplace that’s finally operating at the tempo he expects. That alone won’t beat Mercedes or Red Bull. But if Ferrari really has found consistency early — and if the decision-making matches the enthusiasm — it’s a far more dangerous place to start than last year.
