Claire Williams on Hamilton’s rough Ferrari debut: “If anyone can make it work, it’s Lewis”
Lewis Hamilton didn’t sugarcoat it. After another bruising Sunday, he called his first year at Ferrari a “nightmare.” That’s a heavy word for a seven-time champion — and a fair summary of a season where the results haven’t matched the romance.
Hamilton’s switch from Mercedes to Ferrari was the blockbuster move of 2025, the sort of transfer that writes itself into F1 folklore if the trophies follow. They haven’t, at least not yet. With three rounds to go, Hamilton is still hunting his first podium in red and trails Charles Leclerc by 66 points. There was the Sprint win in Shanghai — a flash of the old ruthlessness — but not much sustained momentum. Brazil brought more pain: terminal floor damage after clipping Franco Colapinto’s Alpine, while Leclerc was collateral in the Oscar Piastri/Kimi Antonelli tangle. Dreams of a clean arc to title contention turned messy in a hurry.
Claire Williams has seen enough big-name moves up close to know when to reach for the patience card. Speaking on talkSPORT, the former Williams deputy team principal argued that this sort of adaptation is routinely underestimated.
“I think we can all probably underestimate how hard it is for a driver to change team,” Williams said. “Lewis was at Mercedes for a long, long time… he was able to shape it in the way that he perhaps wanted to a bit, and he’s now transitioned over to what is a really different team, with a hugely different culture.”
Different is doing a lot of work there. Ferrari’s cadence — the politics, the pressure, the tifosi microscope — is unlike anything else in the paddock. Even for Hamilton, the learning curve is steep. “Even someone of Lewis’ calibre and experience is still going to take some time to settle in,” Williams added. “He wanted to go to Ferrari, inevitably, to fill the childhood dream… to wear the red overalls with the prancing horse.”
Hamilton himself has been blunt about the gap between dream and reality. “Been living here for a while,” he told Sky F1. “Between the dream of driving for this amazing team and then the nightmare of the results that we’ve had, the ups and downs, it’s challenging.”
No one at Maranello needs reminding of the stakes. Ferrari’s last championship haul was the 2008 Constructors’ title; Kimi Räikkönen remains the Scuderia’s most recent Drivers’ champion from 2007. Hamilton arrived to help end that drought and script a piece of history with an eighth crown. Instead, 2025 has been about firefighting and figuring out where the lap time — and the consistency — went.
This is where Williams offers perspective rather than a verdict. “We’ve just got to give it a bit more time, see what happens going into 2026,” she said. “Sometimes these moves, they work out, sometimes they don’t. But I suppose if anyone can make it work, it’s probably going to be Lewis Hamilton.”
That 2026 mention matters. The sport’s next big rule reset is coming, with new chassis and engine regulations set to reshuffle the competitive order. It’s the kind of watershed that can flip a narrative, and Ferrari knows it. So does Hamilton. The task now is to arrive at that reset with a fully gelled driver-engineer unit, a car concept he trusts, and an operation around him that responds to his inputs the way Mercedes once did.
There’s also the here-and-now. Leclerc has been the reference this season in the sister car, and that internal benchmark is non-negotiable at Ferrari. On Saturdays and Sundays, Hamilton and the team need to string together low-drama weekends that build rhythm — not just flashes like Shanghai. That means trouble-free race starts, fewer self-inflicted wounds, and turning P7s into P4s when the front isn’t reachable. The basics, ruthlessly executed.
It’s easy to forget amid the noise, but transitions of this magnitude are rarely plug-and-play. New systems, new language — literally and figuratively — and a different way of working under pressure all take time to hardwire. The tifosi won’t love the wait, and Ferrari isn’t famous for patience, but the long game is exactly what 2026 invites.
For now, Hamilton’s first Ferrari season will be filed under “hard yards.” The shine of the red overalls hasn’t dulled, even if the results have. And Williams’ point stands: if there’s a driver who can bend a team to his rhythm and turn a nightmare into something worth framing, history suggests it’s Lewis.
