What is going wrong for Hamilton and Ferrari?

British Grand Prix

Venue: Silverstone Dates: 4-6 July Race start: 15:00 BST on Sunday

Lewis Hamilton sees the first six months of his time at Ferrari through two different prisms.

“Everything generally outside of the racetrack is going amazing,” he says, “I couldn’t be happier in that respect. And I’m working as hard as I can to make sure that’s reflected also in my results. I want to be at the front, obviously.”

At the front – with one exception – he has not been. Hamilton has not had the start to his Ferrari career he would have wanted.

His move caused a sensation when it was announced, in February last year, and it dominated the news cycle in the lead-up to this season.

But the reality of Hamilton at Ferrari has so far not lived up to the hype.

The Briton is sixth in the championship, one place and 28 points behind team-mate Charles Leclerc, who has out-qualified him 9-4, at an average advantage of 0.151 seconds.

Hamilton won the sprint race in China, from pole position. But his highest qualifying position for a grand prix was fourth in Monaco and Austria – with Leclerc second on the grid both times. His best grand prix race result is fourth.

Hamilton went to Ferrari convinced they could take him to an eighth world title, although not necessarily in his debut season.

Ferrari started the year confident of battling for both titles, having run McLaren close for the constructors’ championship last season.

Both have fallen short of the level expected of them, as we reach the halfway point of the season – this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

The Ferrari is, on average qualifying pace, the slowest car of the top four teams – at 0.393secs a lap slower behind the pace-setting McLaren.

And Hamilton has rarely been the fastest driver in it – he is further behind Leclerc on pace then he was George Russell in what was a disappointing final season at Mercedes in 2024.

So what is going wrong?

Hamilton, 40, has made much of the fact that he is still adapting to his new team, and that this was always going to take time.

He has pointed repeatedly to the fact that Ferrari operate differently as a team than he is used to, and run their car in a very different way; and that the car itself feels very different from a Mercedes.

“I think it looks a lot worse outside than it probably is on the inside,” Hamilton says. “It’s my first half of the year in a new team.

“It’s interesting to see how different teams work and operate. How they set the car up is completely different.

“And I’m having discussions with engineers to change things… There’s a certain way they like to work and it’s: ‘Hold on a second – that doesn’t actually make sense. Like, this is what I’ve done for the last 17, 18 years here (in F1), and it’s worked in a lot of them.’

“So, getting those things to consistently work with the team and making sure you’re working in a constructive way to make changes.

“I’m constantly battling the engineers, asking them questions. Because they set things up and are like: ‘This is how we always do it’ and I’m like: ‘What about this?’

From Hamilton’s point of view, there are signs of an upward trend. Leaving aside his sprint pole in China, in the first seven races he qualified in the top five only once, also in Shanghai. Starting with Monaco, he has been fourth twice and fifth twice.

Likewise, his gap to Leclerc is coming down. In the first five races of the season, it was 0.227secs; in the subsequent six it’s 0.087secs.

Hamilton says: “The positive is that we are making improvements. We are progressing. Whether or not you see that, that’s not necessarily important to me personally. I feel like I’m making progress. I feel like we are making progress, and that’s what’s most important.”

Qualifying so often sets the trend for races, with overtaking so difficult. But a rough run of luck has also made it tough to see whether Hamilton’s progress is being matched in races.

Having qualified fourth in Monaco, Hamilton was given a three-place grid penalty for impeding Max Verstappen, after a radio miscommunication from his engineer, on a track where overtaking is next-to impossible.

In Spain, he was running fourth in the race until Mercedes out-strategised Ferrari and undercut George Russell ahead of him, and then both Ferraris had a problem in the final part of the race that slowed them. Team principal Frederic Vasseur has refused to say what it was.

In Canada, having out-qualified Leclerc on an error-strewn weekend for the Monegasque, Hamilton hit a groundhog after about eight laps of the race. It damaged his floor and cost him about 0.5secs a lap.

It is situations like this to which Vasseur points when he is defending the team’s performances this season.

Vasseur is cutting an increasingly defensive figure as the pressure mounts over the team’s lack of performance and failure to match its objectives.

Critical articles in two major Italian newspapers before the Canadian Grand Prix questioned Vasseur’s position.

Vasseur reacted angrily, and said the articles were a distraction. “It’s really hurting the team,” he said. “It’s not like this that we’ll be able to win a championship. At least not with this kind of journalist around us.”

It’s inevitable that Ferrari are facing this criticism. After Leclerc and Hamilton qualified 11th and 12th at their first home race of the season in Imola, Leclerc described the team as being “P-nowhere”.

Both drivers have bemoaned the lack of upgrades. The first of these since the fourth race in Bahrain finally arrived in Austria last weekend, and both drivers agreed they were a step forward, but that it would take time to judge how much. More are coming.

Nevertheless, Vasseur insists the car is better than the team have shown in recent races.

“The initial goal was to fight for the championship,” he said in Canada, “but I think it’s true for us, it’s true for McLaren, for Red Bull, for Mercedes. We are all in this mood to fight for the championship at the beginning of the season.

“If you compare with expectations, probably McLaren is one step ahead compared to everybody. And we didn’t do a good job on our side.

“Just speaking about us, we didn’t do a good job, in a couple of races.”

He points out that, after both cars were disqualified in China, they were 60 points behind Red Bull and 40 behind Mercedes two races into the season. Now, they are second in the constructors’ championship. On the flip side, they have nearly half the points of McLaren.

Vasseur describes this as “a decent recovery”.

The fact Ferrari have a stronger combined driver line-up than Red Bull and Mercedes is reflected in the fact that, despite their position in the constructors’ championship, Leclerc is fifth in the drivers’ – behind both McLaren drivers and the lead drivers from Red Bull and Mercedes.

“McLaren are still one step ahead,” Vasseur says. “It means we have to continue to try to do a better job each day and improve.

“You have to put everything together in the right place if you want to achieve a good result today, because in the tyre usage and the tyre performance, or what performance you get from the tyres, I think there is much more than between the cars.

“The car doesn’t matter. If the team is doing a very good job on the tyres, they will be in front. It will be like this until the end of the season. But it’s the same for everybody, we have to do a better job.”

As for Hamilton, he sees this as a building year for 2026, when new rules bring in revised cars and engines and Ferrari expect to be fighting at the very front.

He has generally not been especially comfortable with the type of cars introduced with the 2022 regulations, which demand a different driving style from those that came before. Next year’s cars are different in design again, and may well be different in driving character, too.

“The fact is with this car hopefully we can still fight for second in the constructors’ championship,” Hamilton says. “That would be great.