Why did Hamilton's debut season at Ferrari go sideways? Will it get any better in 2026?

MARANELLO, Italy — At the heart of Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello, scaffolding dominates one side of the Piazza Michael Schumacher. Behind it, Enzo Ferrari’s famous farmhouse — the iconic backdrop for Lewis Hamilton’s internet-breaking F40 photoshoot at the start of the year – is missing its roof.

On a cold mid-December morning, construction workers are busy stripping the white stucco from the upper story, revealing centuries-old brickwork underneath, while the contrasting red window shutters are nowhere to be seen. The renovations appear to be extensive but, assuming they go to plan, they will return the farmhouse to its former glory by June next year.

Looking up at the building, it’s hard to ignore the visual metaphor for the current state of Ferrari’s Formula 1 team. Although 2025 was not intended to be a rebuilding year, following the team’s close fight with McLaren for the 2024 constructors’ title, the limitations discovered in this year’s car early in the season and the difficulties faced by Hamilton on arrival at Maranello, means Ferrari has found itself looking to 2026 for renewed hope.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. The arrival of F1’s most successful driver at its most storied team conjured images of Hamilton fighting for the eighth world title that slipped through his fingers on that fateful Abu Dhabi night in 2021, but at this year’s season finale in the U.A.E., thoughts of an eighth world title had never seemed further away as Hamilton spoke of his need to detox from an annus horribilis.

“At the moment I’m only looking forward to the break,” he said after finishing the last race of the season in eighth. “Just to disconnecting, not speaking to anyone. No one will be able to get in touch with me this winter. I won’t have my phone with me and I’m looking forward to that. Completely unplug from the matrix.”

“I can’t wait to get away from all this,” he added. “Every week, photo shoots and all that kind of stuff. That’s the thing I look forward to, one day, not having to do it all.”

The comments contrast starkly with Hamilton’s mood at the start of the year.

The now-famous photo with the F40 in front of Ferrari’s farmhouse was curated by the seven-time world champion to set the tone for his arrival in Maranello. It summed up the sense of history that went with his move from the team with which he secured six of his seven titles, Mercedes, to the team he had always dreamt of racing for as a child.

Although talking to the media has never been high on any F1 driver’s preseason list, in February, Hamilton spoke at length about his excitement for the season to come and his desire to return Ferrari to championship-winning glory. By August, his press briefings were becoming increasingly short, and after qualifying 12th in Hungary, he used one particularly notable media appearance to label himself “absolutely useless,” adding that Ferrari “probably need to change driver.”

Another disappointing qualifying performance towards the end of the season in Brazil, which left him 13th on the grid for one of his favorite races, evoked more gloom from Hamilton as he faced the cameras.

“This is a nightmare, and I have been living it for a while,” he said. “The flip between the dream of driving for this amazing team and the nightmare of the results we have had, the ups and downs, it’s challenging.”

The resulting headlines were followed a day later by Ferrari chairman John Elkann saying his drivers needed to “focus on driving and talk less.” Although Elkann’s quotes seemed entirely unambiguous in their meaning, both Hamilton and teammate Charles Leclerc played down the suggestion of tensions with their chairman and continued to vocalize their disappointment with the team’s results until the end of the year.

Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur, who reports directly to Elkann and has known Hamilton since his days racing in F1’s feeder series, has done much of the firefighting in the media. His response to Hamilton’s disappointment has been clear and consistent: drivers are bound to be upset after a poor result, and what Hamilton says in front of TV cameras is not a reflection of his mood within the team.

“First, when you are out in Q1, I hope the driver is mega upset with himself and with the team,” Vasseur said this week at Ferrari’s end-of-season news conference in Maranello. “I’m not sure that you journalists prefer someone going to the TV pen saying, ‘No, everything is normal, blah, blah, blah’ — all the usual bulls—.

“I respect perfectly the position of the drivers who have this attitude. And the most important for me is also to have someone collaborating with the team. It’s much better to have someone not speaking in the TV pen and coming back to the debriefing, speaking with the engineers, trying to find solutions. And it’s the attitude that Lewis had even when he had a tough moment at the last part of the season, and this is putting a positive energy into the team.”

As much as Vasseur’s job is to put a positive spin on the situation, there’s no question that Hamilton wears his heart on his sleeve, and what’s said in the pen is undeniably fueled by a heady mix of adrenaline and frustration. What’s more, beyond the headline-grabbing negativity, there has been another constant theme in Hamilton’s quotes throughout the 2025 season.

After his first laps in a Ferrari F1 car at the team’s test track Fiorano in January, he said he was “surprised by just how much I still love what I do.” And for all the disappointment of his first season in red, Hamilton continued to reference his ongoing love for F1 right up until the final race.

“It’s the love for what you do, it’s the love for racing,” he said in Abu Dhabi. “I’ve got amazing support from people around me, my fans. It’s that constant keeping an eye on the dream. I still have a dream that I hold hope in my heart for and that’s what I work towards.”

What went wrong in 2025?

One reason for optimism going forward is the overhaul of F1’s technical and engine regulations for 2026. It provides all teams the opportunity to start afresh and the potential to make big gains that wouldn’t be possible had the rules remained unchanged. For Ferrari, it resulted in a tough decision early in the year.

Hamilton’s high point of the season came with a sprint race victory in China, but just one day later, both Ferraris were disqualified from the grand prix itself. In Hamilton’s case, the disqualification was for excessive wear to the car’s plank, highlighting a fundamental problem that needed to be addressed.

In order to extract the necessary performance to be close to its rivals, Ferrari had to run the car so low to the ground that it risked being declared illegal at the end of each race due to plank wear. Run it high enough to be legal, and the aerodynamic performance generated by the underside of the car seeped away.

According to Vasseur, Ferrari had to “pay the bill for one third of the season” as it addressed the issue. Early-season development that should have been used to close the gap to McLaren was instead focused on recovering the unexpected loss of performance due to the ride height issue.

By April, Ferrari’s management took the tough decision to switch the focus of the design office entirely to 2026 and learn to live with the flaws of the 2025 car. Upgrades already in the pipeline would continue to filter onto the car until the Belgian Grand Prix, but ultimately, Ferrari was never likely to catch up with McLaren from that point onward.

By the fifth round in Saudi Arabia, the Italian team was already 110 points behind the championship leaders, making the decision to focus on 2026 understandable, but it meant the team and its drivers were set for tough times ahead.

“This call to stop after five or six races was a tough one,” Vasseur said. “I’m still convinced that it was the good one, but if I underestimate something, at this stage, it was the psychological effect on every single team member, including drivers.

“Because for sure it was for good reasons, it was to be focused on ’26, to try to get the best this [upcoming] season, but on the other hand, you are into the season and you have still 20 races to go, and you know that somehow you won’t bring any more development. It’s difficult, and probably I underestimated this for them, but also for me personally.”

For Hamilton, who was already struggling to adapt to a new car after 12 years at Mercedes, it meant any changes he needed would only be applied to the 2026 car.

“I think it was difficult for Lewis, and it’s too small a word probably, but it was difficult because after 20 years — I say 20 years because for me McLaren was McLaren-Mercedes and then Mercedes — he spent 20 years with Mercedes, it was a huge change,” Vasseur added. “I personally underestimated the step. It’s not that we are doing worse or better, it’s that we are just doing differently.

“It’s not just about the food or the weather, it’s that every single software is different, every single component is different, the people around him, they were different, and if you are not on the top of everything, you leave on the table a couple of hundredths of seconds, and today with the field that we have, I think it was in Abu Dhabi in Q2 that you had one tenth covering P5 and P15. We were not in full control of every single detail and package, and we lost a bit of the path of the season like this.

“I think perhaps we underestimated for sure the change, the change of culture, the change of people around, the change of everything. And even if we came back to a decent pace — I’m not speaking about classification, I’m speaking about collaboration, and understanding of the car in the last part of the season — I think it was tough.”

What needs to change in 2026?

It’s also important to put Hamilton’s season in context. Some of the headline stats are alarming, such as his failure to score a grand prix podium for the first season in his 19-year F1 career. He was also 86 points shy of Leclerc in the final standings, who managed to score seven podiums and a pole position despite the limitations of the car.

The qualifying battle between the teammates also worked out in Leclerc’s favor — 23 to 7 — with an average gap of 0.254 seconds over Hamilton. That average was slightly skewed by Hamilton’s disastrous wet-weather qualifying in Las Vegas, which removed from the equation, brings the average gap down to a more respectable 0.179 seconds. By comparison, Hamilton’s predecessor Carlos Sainz was 0.109 seconds off Leclerc across his four seasons at Ferrari and 0.189 seconds behind when the team had another difficult car in 2023.

While it’s fair to expect more from Hamilton, who holds the all-time record number of pole positions in F1 at 104, the raw pace is perhaps not quite as disastrous as it first seems. There’s still a clear step that needs to be made in order for Hamilton to make the most of the car Ferrari give him next year and stand any chance of fighting on Leclerc’s level, but Vasseur believes it can come from marginal gains across the board rather than a single issue that needs to be fixed.

“It has to come from everywhere,” he said. “I think that the mindset of the team and the mindset of the driver has to be that, let’s try to do a better job everywhere.

“It’s not that you have something which is going well and the rest is going wrong. At the end of the day, we have to improve. We have to improve into the collaboration with Lewis. We have to improve on the team. He has to improve perhaps on how he gets the best from the car that he has.

“I know what you have in mind — the brakes, for example, that he spent 20 years with one supplier. They changed this season. But we are much more in control now. Every single detail at the end will make the difference. It’s not that when you are three tenths behind someone, it’s not that they have the magic bullet or they have the component in the car with three tenths faster. Quite often, it’s that you have 10 topics where you are three hundredths of a second slower. One after one, we have to tackle each point.”

And Vasseur believes there is still more to come from Hamilton bedding in with the team. Right up until the last race in Abu Dhabi, there were moments where his exchanges with race engineer Riccardo Adami made for an awkward listen.

Hamilton always played down any suggestions his relationship with Adami was not working, but the misunderstandings were likely symptomatic of a driver and team that was not yet locked in step. Vasseur says Ferrari will continue to work closely with Hamilton to better understand what he needs from them, which in turn will help smooth out some of the frustrations along the way and up performance.

“Honestly, it’s also a matter of mindset, a matter of understanding each other,” Vasseur added. “I’m speaking about one side of the garage, because with Charles we know each other. But in this case, it’s more to understand exactly what he needs, what he wants. And for him, the same for me, to understand exactly what he would like to do.”

Much like the farmhouse behind its ugly scaffolding, significant work is still required. Whether it’s enough to bring Maranello back to its glorious past, we’ll only know by next summer.