Lewis Hamilton didn’t exactly sound like a man buoyed by a sixth-place grid slot in Miami, but there was at least a note of momentum in his debrief. After Friday’s Sprint qualifying left him staring at a chunky deficit and wondering aloud why Ferrari’s much-trailed upgrade package hadn’t landed harder, Saturday was a step back towards the sharp end — and, in his view, a missed chance.
Hamilton put the SF-26 sixth on the grid at the Miami Autodrome, trimming the gap to the front compared to Sprint qualifying and cutting closer still in Q2 before the final run in Q3 didn’t quite deliver. The frustration was obvious: not because P6 is catastrophic, but because it’s the sort of position that tells you the car is nearly there, and “nearly” is the most annoying place to be.
“It was an improvement,” Hamilton said after qualifying. “We made lots of changes to the car, we didn’t have software issues. So I think we progressed. We stepped forward.”
The detail about software issues was telling. Ferrari’s weekend has been one of constant recalibration rather than the clean, linear build-up you want around a sprint event, and Hamilton’s tone suggested Saturday finally resembled a normal qualifying day — the kind where you’re tuning performance rather than firefighting.
He sounded particularly encouraged by the middle phase of qualifying. “I think Q2 was feeling really solid, and then when I got to Q3 just wasn’t able to extract the maximum.”
That’s been the tightrope with 2026 cars already: the window can be narrow, and what feels tidy one session can feel edgy the next. Hamilton wasn’t hiding from the result, either. “I don’t feel comfortable in P6, it’s not where I want to be. So quite unhappy with P6 naturally, but I’m happy that we’ve made changes. We progressed. We did improve. I think top three was probably possible.”
Normally, that kind of line gets filed under post-qualifying self-soothing. Here, it didn’t land that way. Hamilton’s complaint wasn’t about a lack of pace full stop; it was about not nailing the end of the job once Ferrari had started to look more coherent.
And now the forecast threatens to flip the whole script anyway.
Miami’s start time has been moved earlier to avoid the worst of an expected late-afternoon thunderstorm, but rain is still predicted around the 1pm local start. Asked whether he’d take a wet race from P6, Hamilton didn’t hesitate: “Yeah, P6.”
It wasn’t bravado so much as realism. From sixth, you’re relying on others to make mistakes or on strategy to create openings — and wet weather tends to provide both, especially at a circuit where confidence on the brakes and traction out of slow corners can swing lap time wildly.
“I think the rain will play a part,” he said. “Yeah, rain would be the biggest part. I’m expecting tomorrow the car to feel a lot better, but it’s gonna be wet, so… I’m confident with the balance that I have today in wet, hopefully we should be in a good place.”
There was a notable caveat, though. Hamilton hasn’t convinced himself — or anyone else — that he holds an automatic advantage if it rains. When asked directly how confident he feels in the wet, he kept it measured. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know who’s been in the wet. We’ll see tomorrow. I plan to go forward.”
It’s an unusually cautious answer for a driver with his reputation in mixed conditions, but it fits the wider 2026 theme: new machinery, new behaviours, and a tyre picture that still seems to be annoying drivers as much as it’s challenging them.
Hamilton has already sampled the SF-26 in the wet in Barcelona and again at Fiorano, and he didn’t romanticise the experience — particularly on Pirelli’s wet-weather rubber.
“It was pretty horrible in Barcelona, it was not a fun day,” he said. “It was very slippery, 350 kilowatts to put down, and yeah, wasn’t the most fun. But the wets are not usually that fun nowadays. Back in the day, when we had grippier tyres it was better.”
That complaint is more than nostalgia. With the 2026 cars asking drivers to manage power delivery carefully and with wet-weather grip still a recurring talking point, tyre preparation becomes a competitive tool as much as a safety issue. Hamilton, for one, has been pushing the FIA on exactly that.
In April, the FIA confirmed teams are now allowed to increase tyre blanket temperatures for intermediates, following driver feedback aimed at improving initial grip and performance in wet conditions. Hamilton made it clear he sees it as a rare, tangible win for drivers trying to get ahead of a problem rather than simply complain about it after the fact.
“They’ve made a change to the blanket temps for the inters, that’s something I suggested and I pushed for,” he said. “It was amazing, it was great to see them take a step.”
He also wants the same approach applied more aggressively to the full wets, describing the tyre as “the slipperiest of conditions” and “horrible” without the extra help. Hamilton said he’d run blankets on the wet tyre in testing and felt a clear improvement — and in Miami, he suggested everyone will be running with that assistance on race day.
“I’ve also said that they have to put the blankets back on the extreme wets,” Hamilton explained. “And I had them put on in the test, and it was much better. So we all have blankets for tomorrow.”
So Sunday has the feel of a pivot point in Ferrari’s weekend: a car that finally looked closer to the front when it was tidied up and freed of distractions, lining up just far enough back that a clean, dry race could trap it in traffic — but with weather in the air that could open doors.
Hamilton’s not pretending P6 is acceptable. But in Miami, with the start time brought forward and the sky still threatening to intervene, he knows exactly what matters: give him a race with variables, and he’ll back himself to create the sort of forward motion that’s been missing so far.
