Headline: Neil Martin says Ferrari’s calls are “not about the tools” as Hamilton pushes for change under Maranello pressure
Ferrari’s strategy playbook isn’t broken. The way it’s being used under fire is.
That’s the view of Neil Martin, the team’s former head of strategy, who believes “external influences” and the sheer weight of expectation around Ferrari have repeatedly bent decision-making out of shape — and not for the first time.
Martin knows the terrain. Hired from Red Bull in 2011 after that bruising Abu Dhabi finale cost Fernando Alonso the 2010 title, he spent five years inside Maranello’s race-ops machine before departing in 2015. Speaking to Champions Speakers in association with PlanetF1.com, he was clear: Ferrari’s strategy tools were “state of the art” when he left — and the lapses fans remember weren’t about computing power.
“Just having the tools is not good enough,” Martin said. “You need communication which is good, you need engineers who can make clear, crisp decisions based on that information. And I think other factors, such as the pressure of the entire nation for Ferrari to win, and all sorts of external influences. Under that pressure I think people probably are making decisions that I certainly wouldn’t make.”
It tracks with what we’ve seen this season. In 2025, Ferrari’s title drought remains the sport’s longest-running cliffhanger — no championship of any kind since 2008 — and the errors have often felt cultural rather than computational. Charles Leclerc’s 2022 challenge, dented by pit-wall missteps, was the cautionary tale. Now it’s Lewis Hamilton who’s felt the strain.
Hamilton is still hunting his first podium in red and has had some terse team-radio exchanges with engineer Riccardo Adami. Back in July at Spa, he revealed he’d submitted “documents” to help reset Ferrari’s approach after a stuttering start to life at the Scuderia. Over the summer break, it emerged those proposals stretched beyond car tweaks to how Ferrari works: communication between departments, the flow of information, and the way race weekends are executed.
If that sounds like a driver stepping into the process, it is. Hamilton has been explicit about why he’s going “the extra mile”: he doesn’t intend to follow Alonso and Sebastian Vettel as multiple world champions who came close in red, but left without the big one.
The seven-time champion has also admitted the Ferrari experience — all that history, all those eyes — has blunted the joy at times. Speaking across the Dutch GP weekend and into Monza, he called for a reset in mood as much as method.
“We’re going to work hard, keep our heads down, try to change a few things in our approach and start to enjoy ourselves,” he said. “It’s been so much pressure in this first half of the season and it’s not been the most enjoyable. I think, ultimately, just to get on top of everything — the amount of work we have, all the new partners, the amount of shoots we’ve done, getting integrated into a new team… it’s a big, big team. It’s also the biggest brand in our sport as well. So with a combination of all those different things, it’s been a lot.”
Then came the line that felt like a line in the sand: “If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, then why are you doing it? … I just really want to focus on getting back to that enjoyment… I’ve joined the team that I’ve always dreamed of driving for and there’s been so much noise around that it’s clouded us from getting to enjoy it.”
Strip away the noise and the message from both camps is broadly aligned. Martin is saying the system can work — if you trust it and cut through the interference. Hamilton is trying to pull the same levers from the inside, standardising how Ferrari makes and communicates decisions when the visor is down and the windows for action are seconds long.
That’s the hard part at Ferrari. The car evolves, the personnel changes, but the atmosphere doesn’t. The Tifosi’s energy is intoxicating at Monza; it also floods the room. In those moments when a stop is marginal or a tyre call could swing a race, clarity has to beat caution, conviction has to beat committee. If not, you get the kind of half-steps that have dogged Maranello’s modern era.
There’s still time for Hamilton’s first Ferrari season to change tone. The fight at the front in 2025 has been unforgiving, and podiums are a narrow door on Sundays. But whether this becomes a story of incremental fixes or a genuine culture shift will hinge on something smaller than a new front wing or an extra kilowatt: who has the authority to make the call, and how quickly everyone else falls in behind it.
As Martin put it, the tools are there. The question is whether Ferrari can keep the noise out long enough to use them.
