Lewis Hamilton arrived at Ferrari with the sort of gravitational pull only a seven-time world champion carries — but it still felt, early on, like a celebrity guest walking into someone else’s house. A few rough weekends and the inevitable comparisons with Charles Leclerc did little to soften that impression.
Now, as the 2026 season starts to take shape, the internal weather at Maranello sounds like it’s changing fast. And for Leclerc, that shift could be the more uncomfortable story than any lap-time deficit.
Former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley, who retains close ties to the team, says Hamilton is increasingly “corralling the team around him” and becoming the figure Ferrari people — and the Italian press — are instinctively rallying behind. In other words: the momentum isn’t just on-track.
That’s a meaningful statement in a place where status and sentiment can be as potent as updates and aero maps.
Hamilton’s recent run has given the romance some hard numbers. Back-to-back second places in Monaco and Montreal were followed by his first grand prix victory in red in Barcelona — a landmark result in a season that has already resisted easy patterns. Leclerc, meanwhile, didn’t even see the flag last time out, a late DNF that has left him 40 points adrift of his new team-mate in the standings.
None of that automatically makes this a one-way street. But it does change the noise around it — and in Ferrari’s ecosystem, noise has a habit of becoming pressure.
Smedley’s take, delivered on the High Performance Racing podcast, is blunt about where the balance currently sits.
“You can’t say that Lewis is going to spank him every single weekend, that would be ridiculous,” he said. “But if you look at the balance of performance between the two drivers… and this is a Lewis now that is corralling the team around him.
“Everything that I see when I read the Italian newspapers or I talk to my mates in Ferrari, they all love him. They’re all putting him on a pedestal. He’s getting better and better and better.
“I think the balance, at the minute, it’s not very nice for Charles. Lewis is way ahead of him over the last few races.”
The key line there isn’t even the performance one — it’s the description of how the building is responding. Leclerc isn’t just Ferrari’s long-time incumbent; he’s the academy graduate who debuted in 2019, became the face on the posters and, for years, the central bet to end a championship wait stretching back to 2008. He’s also only recently extended his commitment to the team, doubling down on a partnership that looked designed to run deep into the next era.
So when a global icon like Hamilton starts collecting affection and influence inside Maranello, it doesn’t simply create a “team-mate battle”. It subtly rewrites the emotional pecking order — and that can be a brutal thing for any driver to live through, never mind one who’s been asked, repeatedly, to carry Ferrari’s hopes.
Hamilton’s presence was always going to force a recalibration. Ferrari didn’t hire him to be a supporting act. But the speed with which the atmosphere seems to be tilting is notable, especially after the “challenging start” Hamilton himself had to weather. The last few races have looked like a veteran finding the right levers — in the car, in the engineering group, and in the wider culture that surrounds Ferrari.
Smedley, though, isn’t predicting a season-long rout. He expects Leclerc to reassert himself as 2026 unfolds, even if he’s leaning Hamilton’s way for the bigger prize.
“What will happen is that it will be more balanced towards the end of the season,” Smedley said. “But I just think that Lewis will nick it.”
That forecast fits the broader feel of this year: early in a new regulatory cycle, upgrade cycles are aggressive, the pecking order is elastic, and form swings can look dramatic before the development paths converge. Smedley pointed to Ferrari’s trajectory as a case in point — strong in Monte Carlo, then bolstered by a Barcelona package that helped turn promise into a win.
“Ferrari had a very, very good car in Monte Carlo,” he said. “You saw them with a decent car, they brought a package to Barcelona, and it was a very good car.
“Now, will they have the best car at the end of the season? Maybe, maybe not. It would be ridiculous to try and call that here now, because everybody is in this very early stages of development.
“But things are changing. Things will continue to change throughout the season, and it’s exciting, it’s good for the fans.”
Hamilton, for his part, has also tried to keep a lid on the euphoria, stressing that Ferrari still has work to do if it wants to win regularly and properly mount title campaigns. That caution matters, because Barcelona wasn’t just a morale boost — it was also the season’s first grand prix win by a driver not in a Mercedes, a stat that underlines how quickly one breakthrough can distort perception if you let it.
Next stop is Austria, where both Ferrari drivers have history: Hamilton won at the Red Bull Ring in 2016 (and also took victory at the venue in 2020’s Styrian Grand Prix), while Leclerc won there in 2022. On paper, it’s simply another round. In reality, it’s another pressure test — for Hamilton to prove this new Ferrari rhythm is repeatable, and for Leclerc to remind the team, the paddock, and perhaps himself, that he’s not about to be quietly repositioned as the other side of the garage.
Because at Ferrari, once the pedestal gets built, it doesn’t take much for everyone to start looking in the same direction.
