Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton said he is “praying” the F1 2026 regulations will be better than the current cycle which he described as “the worst one” of his career.
The ground-effect era has coincided with a dramatic loss of form for Hamilton with the driver failing to win a race this year, prompting him to hope for a big change come next season.
Lewis Hamilton makes ‘praying’ hope for 2026 regulations
The 2026 ruleset will be the fifth regulation change of Hamilton’s career but a mix-up of the rules has not always worked in his favour.
In 2009, the then-reigning World Champion finished fifth after McLaren fell behind the likes of Brawn GP, while 2014 marked the start of an era of Hamilton dominance, which saw him win six of a possible eight titles.
But 2022 has brought the worst form of Hamilton’s career and, having previously never finished lower than fifth in the championship, he has only finished above that once in the four years of ground effect regulations.
All of this has left him “praying” for a return to form in 2026 after he labelled the current regulations as “probably the worst” of his career.
“It’s been really interesting,” he said of the regulation changes he has experienced. “’09 was depending on what your team does with the interpretation of those rules.
“Like McLaren in 2009, I remember the first day back in the year, they said that the rules were 50 per cent less downforce so they built the car to have 50 per cent downforce. I remember arriving back in January and they’re like: ‘Oh, we’ve already hit our targets.’
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“And I’ll be like: ‘Wow, is that normal?’
“We get to the first test and there’s no downforce at all and we’re miles off. So I learned a lot through that experience.
“Then 2014 was incredibly exciting, also just because I was in a new team and I could see the amazing work that had been done already a couple years before, particularly on the engine.
“And ’17 was cool because it was a bigger, wider car. Just looked beefier and more downforce. It was mega.
“This generation was probably the worst one, I would say, and I’m praying that the next one is not worse.”
That may be more on hope than expectation, though, as Hamilton himself said simulator runs made him unsure if fans would like it.
“I think it’s really, really hard to predict what it’s going to be like,” he said. “I don’t want to dog it, I don’t want to say too many negative things.
“It feels so much different, I’m not sure you’re going to like it, but maybe I’ll be surprised and maybe it’ll be amazing.
“Maybe overtaking will be incredible. Maybe it’ll be easier to overtake. I don’t know.
“We have less downforce, more torque. Driving in the rain, I can imagine will be very, very, very tough, much harder than it is already with what we have today.
“But as I said, we might arrive and might have better grip than we anticipated. Whether you’ll like the fact that we’re downshifting at the end of straight and different boost parameters, different driving now, but it is a massive challenge for us all.
“And I think that’s really what sports really about, right? It’s about continuously challenging us ourselves.
“If we just did the same thing all the time, then it’d be easy.”
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