Lewis Hamilton’s first proper taste of Ferrari’s SF-26 wasn’t about lap times or early pecking-order noise. It was about mood — his, and the team’s — after a bruising 2025 that left him without a podium for the first time in his career and, by the end, looking every bit like a driver who’d run out of answers.
At Fiorano on Friday, the message was different. Hamilton climbed out after the shakedown talking less like a man carrying last year around in his helmet and more like someone who’d finally hit reset.
“It reignites,” he said afterwards. “It really also reminds me why I love doing what I do and why I love this sport.”
Ferrari’s launch day was the usual blend of theatre and intimacy: the new car presented, then straight out onto the team’s private strip of tarmac with the hardcore at Turn 1 pressed up against the fences, flags and camera phones ready. Hamilton was given the first laps of the SF-26 before Charles Leclerc took over, and both drivers stayed behind afterwards to greet the fans gathered at the first corner.
Hamilton, now 41, didn’t pretend that the emotion is fading with familiarity. If anything, he made a point of how much the sensory stuff still lands — the vibration through the chassis when the car fires, the moment the garage door opens, and the immediate sightline down to where the tifosi gather.
“Literally, when they open the door you can see the Tifosi,” he said. “That’s something that I will never get used to.”
The interesting subtext here is what Ferrari needs from Hamilton in 2026, and what Hamilton needs from Ferrari. This isn’t his first season in red anymore, which means the honeymoon has officially expired. Last year wasn’t merely “disappointing”; it was difficult in a very specific, very public way. Leclerc had the edge on pace, Hamilton’s weekends too often unravelled early, and he ended the year with four consecutive Q1 exits — the kind of statistic that would’ve sounded absurd even a couple of seasons ago.
And looming over all of it is the contract situation: Hamilton’s current Ferrari deal expires at the end of 2026. That doesn’t create panic on its own, but it does put weight on every early-season sign, every internal tweak, and every piece of language a driver uses when he’s asked how it’s going.
So Hamilton leaning hard into “reconnecting” at Fiorano wasn’t accidental. It’s the word you reach for when you want to underline buy-in — with the engineers, with the factory effort, with the idea that you’re still all-in on the project even after the first year didn’t deliver.
“Today is really about reconnecting: reconnecting with the team, reconnecting with that passion of all the people that follow this team,” he said.
There was also a little, telling human detail: Hamilton joked about the winter break always coming with that split-second anxiety — do you still fit in the cockpit when you get back? — before noting that, yes, he slid in “completely fine”. It’s small talk on the surface, but it also reads like a driver deliberately steering the narrative away from 2025’s dead ends and back towards the physical, practical reality of starting again: new car, new sensations, new habits to build.
On Saturday he doubled down with a short Instagram post that carried the same tone — gratitude to the factory, a nod to the tifosi, and a pointed line that felt like it was aimed as much at himself as anyone else: “New year, new drive. Same mission.”
The bigger change, though, is one that won’t show up in launch photos: Hamilton will start 2026 with a different race engineer. Riccardo Adami has been moved into a new role focusing on Ferrari’s junior scheme and its TPC programme, leaving Hamilton heading into the season without the continuity you’d normally want after a tough first year together.
For the first pre-season test in Barcelona — which begins tomorrow — Ferrari expects Leclerc’s engineer, Bryan Bozzi, to manage Hamilton. The team, when asked recently, couldn’t confirm whether Hamilton’s longer-term engineering replacement will be an internal promotion or an external hire.
That matters because “reconnecting” can’t just be a nice theme for launch day; it has to turn into operational clarity at the track. Hamilton doesn’t need cosseting, but he does need a channel on the radio that’s instinctive, sharp, and aligned — especially after a season where the margins were clearly not in his favour.
Fiorano doesn’t answer the hard questions, and nobody sensible should pretend it does. But Hamilton’s body language and choice of words did. This looked like a driver who understands exactly how quickly time can start to feel hostile in Formula 1 — and who’s trying to make sure that, in 2026, it doesn’t.
Ferrari’s new car has turned a wheel, the tifosi have had their first glimpse, and Hamilton has had his first moment in the SF-26 to remind himself what this is supposed to feel like.
Now comes the part where the romance has to become results.
