Lewis Hamilton still hasn’t won a grand prix in Ferrari red, but the more telling detail three rounds into 2026 is how quickly he’s reinserted himself into the sharp end of races — and how little of it looks like the Hamilton we watched wrestling the ground-effect era into reluctant compliance.
Martin Brundle’s read is that the shift in regulations has effectively handed Hamilton back a canvas he recognises. With Formula 1 moving away from the bruising, floor-dominated ground-effect cars and back towards overbody aerodynamics in a smaller, lighter package, Brundle reckons the ingredients are finally in place for Hamilton to do more than just pick up the odd podium. In his view, a race win — and even a serious tilt at an eighth title — isn’t a nostalgic daydream. It’s plausible.
“Lewis clearly enjoys these cars much more,” Brundle said on Sky Sports News, pointing not just to lap times but to the vibe around Hamilton as Ferrari’s season takes shape. That matters. In modern F1, the margins are too fine for a driver to be mentally grinding through weekends just to extract a tolerable result. Brundle’s point wasn’t that Hamilton has rediscovered speed — nobody with 105 wins ever truly loses that — but that he’s rediscovered a relationship with the car that looks instinctive rather than negotiated.
This season’s technical reset has been a double hit: chassis regulations that prioritise a different aerodynamic platform, and a new power unit formula running a 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power. Brundle’s view is that the combination plays into Hamilton’s preferences far more than the “smashing against the ground” machines of recent years, cars that demanded a certain tolerance for brutality and compromised feel. Hamilton never stopped scoring points in that period, but the sharpness at the very front — the sense of a driver dictating terms rather than surviving them — was sporadic.
That’s why Ferrari’s early flashes have felt significant even without a win. Hamilton’s first podium for the team came in China, where he finished third behind a Mercedes operation that’s started 2026 like it has something to prove. More revealing than the trophy, though, has been the week-in, week-out proximity to the front and the way he’s gone wheel-to-wheel with Charles Leclerc in properly committed scraps for best-of-the-rest honours.
If you’ve watched Hamilton closely since 2022, you’ll recognise the note Brundle is hitting: this is arguably the most “Hamilton” he’s looked since 2021, when he and Max Verstappen turned every Sunday into a pressure-cooker. He’s more animated, more decisive on track, and — crucially — he seems to believe the car will respond when he asks questions at the limit.
Brundle isn’t pretending there’s an easy road to a championship, especially not inside Ferrari. He made the obvious point that tends to get underplayed whenever a seven-time champion is involved: if Hamilton is going to win the title, he’s going to have to beat Leclerc in the other Ferrari.
“He’s got to beat Charles Leclerc if he’s going to win the world championship,” Brundle said. “Let’s see if he can sustain that.”
That’s the real intrigue. Because while it’s tempting to frame Hamilton’s 2026 in terms of personal renaissance — new rules, new team, old magic — the internal picture is where it becomes consequential. Leclerc isn’t a placeholder team-mate or a compliant second car; he’s the driver Ferrari has been built around, and he’s started the year ahead of Hamilton in the standings. If Hamilton turns this into a genuine title chase, Ferrari’s season becomes as much about managing a two-pronged campaign as it is about closing the gap to Mercedes.
And right now, Mercedes is the reference. Three grands prix, three wins. The first two were 1-2 finishes, and the team also took the Sprint victory in China. Kimi Antonelli leads the Drivers’ standings on 72 points, nine ahead of George Russell, with Leclerc third and Hamilton fourth. The Ferrari drivers are 23 and 31 points back respectively — a chunk, but hardly fatal with 19 race weekends still to run.
That calendar length is the other reason Brundle is resisting early-season certainty. Miami is next and it’s a Sprint weekend, meaning extra points and more volatility. Brundle expects form to swing as upgrades arrive, because these new cars still have “so much upside potential” — the kind of phrase that usually means engineers can find lap time in more than one direction, and teams can genuinely leapfrog each other if they hit a development window.
Ferrari, Brundle suggested, could take “a big step” in Miami. It’s a bold claim this early, but not an outrageous one given how quickly the order can shift under fresh regulations. The question is whether Ferrari’s step is enough to consistently put Hamilton within “a sniff of a victory” — because Brundle’s bottom line is blunt: if the chance is there, Hamilton can still take it.
“I think Lewis is still very much capable of taking that,” he said.
The subtext across all of this is that 2026 isn’t shaping up as a slow-burn season where you can wait for the championship to come to you. If Mercedes has started fast, it’s also exposed the reality for the chasers: you don’t just need pace, you need momentum, and you need it while the development curve is steepest.
For Hamilton, though, the early signs are exactly what Ferrari needed when it made the biggest driver move in the sport. Not a marketing win. Not a sentimental farewell tour. A driver who looks engaged, quick, and irritated by the idea that the front might be out of reach. If Miami does bring Ferrari closer — and if Hamilton keeps matching that mood with execution — then the conversation changes quickly from “when will he win in red?” to “how many can he win?”
