Why isn't it clicking yet for Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari this year?

Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari was perhaps the most anticipated driver switch in recent Formula 1 history but so far the partnership between the sport’s most successful driver and most successful team isn’t working out as they would have hoped. So what’s going wrong for team and driver? Former Renault F1 driver Jolyon Palmer has taken a close look …

Miami seemed like a weekend where everything was going wrong for Ferrari, amplified by the team radio messages we heard from both drivers during the race’s final stint. But to me this wasn’t a weekend of pit wall mismanagement from the Scuderia – it was more just a trying weekend in terms of car performance.

The Sprint was a race of mixed emotions for Ferrari. Charles Leclerc couldn’t even take to the start after hitting the wall on his way to the grid, yet Hamilton had his smile back after finishing in the top three.

There were understandable questions regarding the team’s decision to send both drivers out on intermediate tyres for their reconnaissance laps to the grid during treacherous conditions, which led to Leclerc’s aquaplaning out-lap crash.

I can see the logic for this move though. For the Sprint, the drivers only do one lap to the grid, rather than come through the pits a number of times, which they do before the Grand Prix. The Sprint was almost certainly going to require intermediate tyres, because over 19 laps the full wet tyre would never be optimal and for that reason I think Ferrari sending their drivers on inters, just to learn what they could, made sense.

The sudden downpour while Leclerc was on his out-lap obviously made the decision look foolish though and the rest of the teams saw this and subsequently took the safer option of the wets.

Throughout the rest of the weekend the story seemed similar. This was a race weekend where operationally Ferrari were actually decent but they just didn’t have the pace in the car.

Hamilton’s third place finish in the Sprint was the perfect illustration of this. Ferrari actually executed the perfect Sprint, given Hamilton was dropping away from the leading pack in sixth position and actually holding up not only Alex Albon’s Williams but also Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin.

Considering you’d usually say these would be conditions Hamilton thrives in, it goes to show how little grip the car had comparatively, even in the damp.

It was this lack of pace that made the gamble for Hamilton easier, as he became the first driver other than the pit lane-starting Yuki Tsunoda to put on slicks – a decision which delivered the result, combined with a driver who was back in his happy place, feeling grip on tyres that were coming up to temperature ahead of his rivals.

On race day much was made of the team radio situation between the two drivers but again I don’t think Ferrari mishandled things particularly.

They’ve had the best pit stops on average this season and did well in Miami again but also optimised the strategy by pitting both cars under Virtual Safety Car when they could, which got them into a position to race Carlos Sainz and potentially even Kimi Antonelli.

Maybe they could have offered Hamilton the chance to pass Leclerc a little sooner, and you could argue this delay maybe cost him the peak of his medium tyres. In reality though, Hamilton actually went no quicker once his teammate let him through and so Ferrari were partly justified in their deliberations – it clearly wasn’t as clear cut as their new signing was suggesting.

Had the team allowed Hamilton through immediately, even if he had been able to extract more pace with his tyres in a better condition, it’s incredibly unlikely he’d have caught and passed Antonelli, who remained comfortably out of striking distance to the flag. The re-swap was also fairly inevitable later on as well to reverse the ‘manufacturing' of the situation and revert the cars to their original positions.

The drivers' disdain over the team radio this year has been humorous to listen into for the neutral, from the 'words of wisdom' at the first race in Melbourne, to the ‘tea party’ of Miami. Whilst it might seem like the drivers are at odds with the pit wall a lot, much of it has to do with an innate frustration at the lack of overall performance.

So why is this? Well in my view, Ferrari have been the most disappointing team so far, having finished 2024 so strongly. With the signing of Hamilton, this should have been a glory year for them and we saw a glimpse of that early on in China, when Hamilton was happier with the car and took the Sprint win, and the team were competitive.

frustration

It then transpired that the configuration that Ferrari were running in China was illegal, with Hamilton being thrown out for excessive plank wear on Sunday night.

All of Formula 1’s cars in this era are extremely sensitive to ride height. The lower you can run the car to the ground, the faster you go as you get more downforce thanks to the ground effect. The limit to this is plank wear and legality.

Ferrari’s car seems more performance-sensitive to this than most and by raising the car they lose a greater percentage of performance as the set-up falls further from their optimised window.

In Miami, the team were chasing ‘overall grip’ and every time we went onboard with Hamilton during qualifying, you could see him sliding on both axles but particularly the rear. This is a clear indication that the car isn’t producing enough downforce and the floor upgrade the team brought a few races ago is clearly still not working properly, even if there have been stronger performances from Leclerc in Bahrain and Jeddah.

Hamilton is a driver that has struggled with snappy rear instability for the last couple of seasons. It was this inconsistency that he was struggling with in the Mercedes last year and that trend seems to have followed him to Ferrari so far too.

He generally likes to attack the corners with high entry speed but needs a stable rear end in order to do that effectively and we saw him trying to rework his driving style in Melbourne to get more out of this car.

Clearly that process is still ongoing, as is trying to find the right rhythm with his race engineer Riccardo Adami – and these are all teething problems that I doubt both team and driver were expecting to still be issues this far into the season.

It’s a home race for the Scuderia coming up next though and the start of a key triple header. It’ll be a tough test for the team on circuits where both downforce and efficiency are critical.

But despite what we hear on the radio, if the team can find a better window for the car then I’ve no doubt Ferrari still have the drivers and procedures in place to deliver victories.