Lewis Hamilton has a theory for how to arrest the first hint of what could become an alarming slide of Formula 1 form in 2026, with the seven-time champion believing the Ferrari simulator has been “sending me in the wrong direction”.<\/p>\n
The standings still point a healthy picture for Hamilton, who is just eight points down on team-mate Charles Leclerc and has been top-seven in every points-paying session (only the two Mercedes drivers can claim the same).<\/p>\n
But after an ultra-encouraging Shanghai weekend – which was also very strong for him relative to Leclerc last year – Hamilton was on the back foot at Suzuka and looked particularly outmatched in Miami.<\/p>\n
Leclerc was ahead in every session of the sprint weekend – including all six qualifying segments across Friday and Saturday – before being relegated behind Hamilton in the grand prix finishing order only for his track-cutting with his damaged Ferrari.<\/p>\n
Qualifying comparison in 2026<\/p>\n
Leclerc 4 – 2 Hamilton<\/p>\n
Average gap: Leclerc 0.081s ahead<\/p>\n
Median gap: Leclerc 0.156s ahead<\/p>\n
Hamilton felt his Miami weekend was wrong-footed from the start, and pointed to the car set-up he and the team had prepared in the simulator as a culprit.<\/p>\n
“If I’m honest, I think the simulator really sends me the wrong direction, so I think I might cut that out for now and give it a run without,” he said after grand prix qualifying.<\/p>\n
Asked the following day to elaborate, he said: “I’m going to have a different approach in the next race. Because the way we’re preparing at the moment is, it’s not helping. And so we’ll see how that goes for the next race.<\/p>\n
“Ultimately it’s always [a matter of] correlation. We go on it, and then get to the track – and the car feels different when you get to a track.”<\/p>\n
The exact nature of the issue was that “the car didn’t feel very snappy on the way into corners and then massive understeer in the mid-corner – so that’s not the balance that you would want”.<\/p>\n
Hamilton – who pointed out that his best weekend in China came without the chance to do sim prep in the run-up (as it was a back-to-back weekend after Australia) – acknowledged that it’s widely known he “doesn’t like simulators in general”.<\/p>\n
“But I’m at the simulator every week in the build-up to this race and working on correlation constantly.<\/p>\n
“You go on it, you prepare for the track, you drive it and you get the car set-up to a certain place – and then you come to the track and that set-up doesn’t work,” he lamented.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“And in the sprint weekend for example, you’ve only got practice one, you don’t really want to veer off from your set-up too far, like with a big suspension change, and so you stay with it. And then you make a change going into qualifying and you’ve only got six laps to get on top of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So in an ideal world I should have started where Charles was at the beginning of the weekend and I think we would have just had a stronger weekend from there on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So I’m not going to go on the simulator between now and the next race [in Canada]. I’ll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff – but I’m just going to back away from it [the simulator] for a little bit and see.”<\/p>\n
Hamilton was ultimately depriled of the opportunity to fully assess his in-weekend progress – as his Ferrari was immediately damaged on Sunday after a tangle with the Alpine of Franco Colapinto, which cost Hamilton “half a second of downforce on the car”.<\/p>\n
“It’s the worst when it happens on lap one as well because then there’s just nothing you can do. And you’re a passenger, just waiting.<\/p>\n
“Honestly, without the damage, I think we would have been right up in the fight. The car was feeling good on the laps to the grid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So it’s a shame because it doesn’t really truly reflect the hard work that the team has done.”<\/p>\n
Lead image courtesy of Craig\u00a0Evans \/\u00a0Spacesuit\u00a0Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton has a theory for how to arrest the first hint of what could become an alarming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-651189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}