Lewis Hamilton turned up at Fiorano this week sounding like a driver who’s finally stopped trying to brute-force a bad year into submission.
On the day Ferrari’s SF-26 rolled out for its first shakedown, Hamilton spoke with an unfamiliar lightness about “new beginnings” and, more pointedly, about stripping back what he says hasn’t been serving him. After the slog of 2025 — a season that never produced a single podium and ended with a bruising run of four straight Q1 exits — the message wasn’t so much defiance as it was a reset button being pressed with intent.
“If you probably look at all my other interviews all the other years, I’d never say that I get excited,” Hamilton said after running at Fiorano. “But I’m massively excited and I think that’s OK to say that.
“I’m excited for new beginnings. It’s been such a focus on resetting, having a good break. Even though it was the shortest one we’ve ever had, it was just what was needed.”
The language he chose was telling: less about lap time and more about habits, patterns, and energy. Hamilton talked about “undoing” certain things over the winter, learning new routines, and “removing things that don’t serve me or bring the right energy” — a continuation of the theme he’d already struck in a social media post around his 41st birthday, when he described 2025 as “a very draining year” and said “the time for change is now”.
It’s the sort of talk drivers often deploy when they need to project calm ahead of a long season. But in Hamilton’s case it also dovetails neatly with what’s happening around him inside Ferrari, because his 2026 campaign already has the feel of a fresh attempt at getting the foundations right — not just in the cockpit, but on the pit wall.
Ferrari has confirmed Hamilton will work with a new race engineer this season, following Riccardo Adami’s move into a different role within the organisation, working with the junior academy and the team’s TPC operation. Hamilton hasn’t yet publicly addressed the split with Adami, but it’s hard to ignore the timing: a difficult first season at Maranello, a new technical era beginning, and now a reworked trackside relationship before a wheel has properly been turned in anger.
In the short term, the arrangement at the opening pre-season test in Barcelona is pragmatic. It’s understood Charles Leclerc’s race engineer Bryan Bozzi is also managing Hamilton through the first days of running — hardly a permanent solution given Leclerc’s own workload, but a measure of how quickly Ferrari has had to reshuffle.
The more intriguing piece is who lands the job for the long haul. The name doing the rounds is Cedric Michel-Grosjean, formerly of McLaren, and regarded as the most likely candidate to slot in as Hamilton’s voice in his ear. Michel-Grosjean was Oscar Piastri’s lead trackside performance engineer in 2025 before leaving McLaren at the end of the year. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s currently on a career break ahead of his next post.
None of this guarantees a turnaround, of course. But there’s a logic to Ferrari wanting a clean start as the sport pivots into the new 2026 regulations. When Hamilton says “it’s unknown what other people have, what cars, what tricks that other people may or may not have and what concepts”, that’s not empty rhetoric — it’s an acknowledgement that this winter’s optimism is built on a genuinely blank page.
For Hamilton personally, it’s also about removing the feeling of last season bleeding into this one. The performance slump in 2025 wasn’t just statistical — it looked heavy. He struggled to match Leclerc’s pace and ended up in the rare position of being last on pure pace in Las Vegas, the first driver to do that since 2009. That’s not the kind of footnote any champion wants stapled to their CV, especially not one who’s built a career on meticulous control of the details.
Which is why, at Fiorano, the most meaningful line might have been the simplest: “The team feels refreshed.” Hamilton talked up the work across departments at Ferrari and framed the next week — when testing properly begins and drivers can “stretch the legs” — as a first glimpse into what this “new generation of car” is going to bring.
There’s no grand proclamation here about titles or redemption. The tone is more measured: keep your head down, focus on the job, take it day by day. That’s what you say when you know you’ve got something to prove but also understand you can’t will it into existence by talking louder.
In 2026, Hamilton doesn’t need slogans. He needs a car that responds, a team structure that supports him, and a trackside relationship that feels intuitive rather than strained. Ferrari’s already shifting pieces to give him that. Barcelona will tell us how much of this is genuine momentum — and how much is simply the hopeful noise that always accompanies a new era before the stopwatch starts telling the truth.
