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Chapter 1: How did Lewis Hamilton achieve his extraordinary F1 turnaround?
The race is on, and with a revitalised Lewis Hamilton still basking in the glory of his first Ferrari Grand Prix win, how did he turn it all around so spectacularly after last year's struggles? And what does it mean for his future and that of team-mate Charles Leclerc? I'm Ed Straw, and joining me to explain how it all happened are Mark Hughes and Scott Mitchell-Mowne.
Well, Scott, the dust has settled on that Hamilton win, which was a huge story, so let's get straight into it. How do you see this new chapter in the Hamilton and Ferrari story playing out? Has he conclusively proved the doubters wrong?
He's certainly proven himself wrong, and I suspect quite a few doubters with it, because Lewis... has been quite honest along the way, to be fair to him, that he has had plenty of doubts. That goes back to his Mercedes struggles before the switch to Ferrari, the kind of mounting sense of concern and a bit of misery as that first Ferrari season went on.
I don't think he was lower than after Hungary qualifying last year.
Was that when he called himself absolutely useless?
Basically, yeah. He said the team needs to consider replacing him or words to that effect. But he came close to reaching that basement a few times through the year in terms of how he talked about himself.
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Chapter 2: What changes did Hamilton push for within Ferrari?
And he admitted after Barcelona, didn't he, that there were moments, he said in the press conference, where he was thinking, oh, sheesh, they say that everybody loses it eventually. Maybe he had. That was his feeling. And we know that Hamilton,
lives um lives very very closely to his emotions so when it's good it's great and when it's bad it's a disaster and his career is you know circling the drain so it was probably never quite as bad as he made out and therefore a lot of doubters wanted to make out as well likewise
He's had a run of races now that are clearly the most convincing he has had since joining Ferrari, arguably since losing the 2021 title too. But the big question mark will always be, what kind of car will he have between now and the end of the season?
what kind of emotional wave will he be riding will it be a good one or a bad one because I think that will dictate a lot of not only his own performances but his mindset and kind of how he goes about things and those two things are very very closely linked for someone like Lewis yeah I think there's two components to that lack of confidence he was feeling last year there was the fact that
A, that generation of car that we've had since 2022, the ground effect cars we had until the end of last year, they just were unsuitable for the way he drives. And there was no getting around that. And his muscle memory was clearly not able to overcome that.
to overcome that so that there was that but then as he transitioned to Ferrari he found that they developed a car which had systems that he absolutely hated so he's actually in a worse situation that he'd been in in some ways than at Mercedes because they developed a car around a lot of engine braking to get the rotation in the car and he doesn't drive it like that he has he hates engine braking and um
So there was two components to it. So, yeah, of course, he was under delivering in that situation. He got two fundamental pieces of the equation weren't there for him. But then that will create doubts when you're not doing the lab time.
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Chapter 3: How has Hamilton's performance compared to Charles Leclerc's?
You'll think, well, how much is that and how much is me? And I think he's had... fortuitous change of regulation to a more compliant car that's much more tolerant of his sort of very hard braking style. And he's pushed for changes. He was pushing for changes all through last year. And Freddy Vasseur has delivered them. And I think those things have come together. And you just saw his...
confidence sort of progressively increasing until I think it was probably Montreal where it was really visible, where, you know, between the walls. And you thought, wow, yeah, this looks like something like Hamilton used to look. And then he's followed it up. And then, you know, the Barcelona win was from the top draw.
So, yeah, I think there's every reason to believe now he has those things in place that he can continue at this level.
Yeah, I don't think there was anything fundamentally wrong with there being doubts over Hamilton and the Hamilton at Ferrari thing. I think the mistake was to have those doubts and mistake that for a conclusion. which I think some people leapt towards. And we know how complicated it is for anyone when they move teams.
It's not that the first year is a free hit, but you have to bear in mind how dramatically different a car can be from one team to another and how much you've got to get on top of and get in tune with. The question for me was, did Hamilton still have the determination and the flexibility and all of those things to do all of that?
And he's answered those questions conclusively with what we've seen, because it's not just Barcelona anymore. It's been a really just impressive and more together Hamilton across the board as he's got things the way he wants them.
Yeah, there's absolutely no doubt that this is a much better version of Hamilton than we have seen pretty much at any point in the ground effect era. There were moments, and those moments were enough, I think, not necessarily in isolation, but in combination with the move to Ferrari, that just made you think, the peak's still there, or if not, let's say the 2020 peak or whatever...
a really, really, really high peak is still there. But is that representative of what he can still be? Or is that more representative of what he was and can occasionally get to, but just kind of the window is just a bit too narrow now. So he kind of falls off either side of that narrow peak. This is a much broader peak now. So we can...
we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence, this is the level that Hamilton is performing at in 2026, rather than a perfect storm of factors.
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Chapter 4: What factors contributed to Hamilton's recent success in F1?
One thing that I really liked about Barcelona, and I wrote this after qualifying in particular, is to come away from Canada and Monaco, back-to-back, second-place finishes, strong drives there, OK, circumstances may have helped the final result, whatever...
The main asterisk there, if there was one, is there's still outlier circuits, there's still places where Hamilton has a really good record, where certain things do kind of align that can make a difference in your end result and how it looks. There wasn't to take anything away from him, it's just that thing of, like, you want the biggest sample set possible.
But after qualifying at Barcelona, when he's, whatever it was, what, half a tenth from pole on a circuit that tests not only the car but the job the driver does...
at that point I was like this is just his level this is just where he's at now because this would have exposed it and obviously we didn't see exactly what Charles Leclerc would have done in Q3 and if Leclerc had been on pole by a tenth and a half and Hamilton's third two tenths of drift you go that's good but it's not great and it's not you know the Hamilton of old
But it now means that moving forward for the rest of the season, or certainly for the next few races up to the summer break, that's the standard that Hamilton will benchmark himself against, that Ferrari will expect, and that we will expect too, rather than just looking at it and going, oh, isn't it nice to see Hamilton have a nice result from time to time?
It's like, no, this is what he needs to be doing. This is what he should be doing. This is what he's capable of doing still.
Yeah, this is no Richard Petty kind of consolation landmark win years after he's been relevant, is it?
Great contemporary reference, Ed.
Exactly. Look it up for those who aren't on board with NASCAR many decades ago. The thing I liked is that Barcelona drive. It had echoes of some of the Barcelona drives of the past, the 2020 victory there when he was just driving so well. And that's the thing that's good. You could see a Hamilton that's kind of in that proper flow state in terms of just the driving's coming naturally to him.
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Chapter 5: What role does team culture play in Hamilton's performance?
Are these true? And if so, is it time they start embracing them? So there's lots to unpick in that category.
group of questions where do you want to start i think rather than seeing it as it's um sometimes portrayed as lewis hamilton coming in with this superior knowledge of um from superior teams and saying what a mess right this needs sorting this needs sorting and this needs sorting i think it's more he's coming in he's tried the car he says i cannot drive this this just this is hopeless i can't drive it in this way you've developed a car completely different from anything
That I need to drive and the impact of on that and all the throughout the department throughout the whole company and all the different departments and all the different engineering groups will be, you know, if we're going to give him a car that. like he says that he needs, that behaves the way that we... It's a completely different philosophy.
Everything, the whole car, the aerodynamics of the car have been developed around our previous philosophy. We've got to buy in. If we're going to take notice of Lewis, we've got to buy in. And it's a complete radical rethink on everything. And that's what Freddy Vasseur has essentially done. And he has pushed, you know, against the grain in quite a few cases.
And you can imagine there would be resistance because you've got engineers there who are saying, why are we taking notice of the slower driver? The faster driver says this is good. So, yeah, there'd be a natural reluctance there that it would be Fred's job to galvanize everybody around what it is that he's trying to do to give Lewis what it is he's asking for.
I don't think it's Lewis saying, this is how you do it. I think it's Lewis saying, this is what I need and you're paying me all this money. You've employed me and you're putting one hand behind my back. What's the point of that? If you want to get full value from me and I'm going to get anything from this partnership, this is what I need and it's your job to give me it.
And that's taken a year to do that. So, yeah, he's very definitely been part, a very important part of me given the car where they're at now. But yeah, I don't think it's like this all-seeing, super-wise sort of wizard guru that it's sometimes portrayed as. It's just pretty simple, really.
It's just saying, I can deliver you much more lap time if you give me what I need, but you haven't got it at the moment.
If it was as simple as basically mega-intelligent switched-on driver comes to Ferrari with knowledge of a title-winning championship, Sebastian Vettel's sin at Ferrari would have gone a lot better than it did.
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Chapter 6: How are Hamilton's and Leclerc's driving styles affecting their results?
And in a way, with what Ferrari's done with Hamilton eventually, it's kind of the inverse of the usual phrase. They've put their mouth where their money is. It's one thing to shell out all of the cash... because Ferrari can afford it, their partners would have facilitated it, they've got all of these marketing benefits from having Lewis Hamilton on board the team.
Actually, paying someone an absolutely metric F-tonne of money to come and drive for your F1 team is the easy part of it. But then actually doing the stuff that they want to do, going out on a limb for that driver, especially when, as Mark pointed out, it's not been the fastest driver. So you're taking...
a punt a sort of calculated punt on well let's give him the benefit of the doubt because we're already giving him the benefit of tens of millions but let's actually do some stuff differently because that's really really hard to do that's hard for any team to do let alone a team that is steeped in certain ways of working.
And I appreciate that speaking in a generality, and it might sound a bit stereotypical of, you know, Ferrari, slightly shambolic, doesn't work the right way. But it hasn't won in a meaningful way, i.e. a championship, in a really, really long time for a reason.
So to finally start doing things a bit differently and run the car differently, change configurations, go away from long-term partners, even if it's only a part move away, that's a massive sort of, it's a show of confidence in Hamilton, but it's also just a kind of a, What's the best way of putting it? A line in the sand, almost, of, well, we're going to do absolutely everything we can.
No excuses here. Let's do it. Let's just change what he says we need to change for him. It doesn't necessarily mean that Ferrari's completely reinventing the wheel with how it's operating as an F1 team, but it's just doing that little bit more that it would naturally be a bit resistant to do.
It's also a good...
element to feed into the whole hamilton legacy element because i think this has been uh overstated but people who want to kind of run down with his son say oh he came into a mclaren that was very good and he went to mercedes it had already been built up and gone through the difficult times and won so what's he doing in terms of team building etc and it's fair to say that for example when he moved to mercedes he didn't make the best impression on everyone initially it took him a little bit of time to understand how to interact in the best way with the whole team which he learned really really well and then he was
hugely effective but i think mark to me the fact hamilton's been able to take a situation where he was so down on himself and everything where there were definitely times where he would have just thought this is just not working what have i done this is a mistake it would have been so easy to either just give up and just bank another another year or two paycheck take the money say you've got a
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Chapter 7: What does Hamilton's Ferrari win mean for his legacy?
And I think that determination to not just throw the towel in, because he'd been there before. He'd considered throwing the towel in at the end of 21 after what happened in Abu Dhabi. but he still came back. It's just that drive to keep on delivering and keep on challenging himself that made him hang on, really, and drove him to get those changes made in the team, to see then where he was.
If he'd got all those changes and the regulation changes and everything like that, and he was still three-tenths off Charles Leclerc, two and a half, then I don't think you would have seen... you would have seen them hanging around for very long. But this is different. This has given them that spark that was missing.
It must have come down to just wanting to make sure that ultimately nothing was left on the table. And then at the end of that, you go... No, I have lost it a little bit. There's a podcast clip, I think, that I saw doing the rounds of Daniel Ricciardo basically reflecting on his own F1 exit and basically going, actually, Red Bull did me a favour. I lost it. I didn't think I had.
I really wanted to hang on and prove that I hadn't, but I'd lost a bit. And he's comfortable admitting that now. He's like, I can't do... Ricciardo's a really interesting one because I remember speaking to him about this in Singapore a few years ago. He has...
he has a really interesting perspective on Hamilton which I need to dig those quotes out in full at some point and basically explains just like why he's so impressed by a Hamilton and a Fernando Alonso just in terms of that not only ability to just keep grinding at that age and point in your career but just keep finding new motivations and finding ways to drive yourself on now
That is something that has characterized the second half of Hamilton's career, like massively, just this work ethic, this ability to just keep finding ways to come back and dominate. Even when Mercedes were winning, he always found a way to sort of move the bar enough to keep getting just that little bit better.
And then, yeah, there was a bit of a question mark when things weren't working out so well after 2021. But you would still imagine that there's an underlying motivation there. It's just how much of a knock did that take?
And I would love to know in his heart of hearts what percentage of confidence he actually had that if he got what he needed, to sort of paraphrase what Mark was saying, he could do a better job. Because... I don't think he was completely convinced by it. And there were times last year where he, if he didn't say this verbatim, he basically admitted it.
He admitted that it was sort of as much hope rather than expectation that the change of regs would fix things, because he wasn't sure. He kept having these little moments where he thought things were getting better in the ground effect era, and then it turns out they weren't.
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Chapter 8: How does the current Ferrari team structure impact driver performance?
And things just were so inconsistent that I truly believe there were points where he doubted. I don't think it's lip service. I think he did doubt whether he had lost it to some degree. Even if it's not on my best day, I'm as good as I ever was. It's just all those best days aren't coming around as much as they used to, which is just the passage of time.
I wonder if as this season goes on, maybe if he renews and stays on for another year, especially if, you know, let's say he wins the world championship and you get one of those really long champions interviews with him where Lewis is in full flow and opens up more.
I wonder if we'll find out exactly how close he was to calling time early and at what point, at what percentage he was sort of thinking, no, 26, it'll be my year and how much of it was, I really hope that this works.
Yeah, and the opportunity and the option was there for him just to accept that it wasn't there. So I like the fact that he's been willing to do that. We should stress he's got one win and he's had a decent run of race at the start of the season. There's still a long way to go before this is confirmed. Oh, Hamilton back to his best, etc.
But what we can definitely say is recently he has been certainly at least near his best, which is very, very encouraging. And let's see how it plays out over the balance of the season. Right, we're going to start talking a little bit more broadly about what's going on at Ferrari now, Mark.
We'll start off with a question that comes from the race members club from The Penske Duck, who says, where is Lewis Hamilton finding this performance level over Charles Leclerc?
I think, first of all, we need to be a little bit careful about that he has got an ongoing performance advantage over Charles Leclerc. What's happened is that Charles had two... He races Canada and Monaco where he couldn't get the bricks up to temperature. Canada is very cold. Monaco is very low energy.
And almost as a knee-jerk reaction to that, he said, right, okay, let's try Lewis's bricks and let's try carbon industry bricks, which... Probably you didn't need to for Barcelona because it's not a circuit that's a very high energy circuit. It's not somewhere where you probably were going to have trouble getting the brakes up to temperature.
So I think they have a very different approach to corner entry in the way that they get the rotation on the car. And I suspect that the Brembos are probably more suitable for Charles in the way that he overlaps cornering with earlier braking. And that's where he's getting the rotation in the car, whereas Lewis is much straight line for longer later and harder on the brakes.
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