Lewis Hamilton has given a firm denial that Ferrari’s decision to stop aerodynamic development on its car earlier had any “psychological” impact on the team.<\/p>\n
Boss Fred Vasseur revealed toward the end of the season that the Scuderia had elected to switch off development of the SF-25 from as early as April so full attention could be placed on the major changes coming in for 2026.<\/p>\n
Ferrari’s rivals did not follow this philosophy, with McLaren, Red Bull, and Mercedes all bringing major upgrades as the team slipped to fourth place in the constructors’.<\/p>\n
For the first time in his career, Hamilton failed to score a grand prix podium in a season he branded a “nightmare” and himself as “useless” following a particularly galling qualifying in Hungary, but the seven-time champion has given his emphatic backing of the decision to stop developing the 2025 machine.<\/p>\n
“It didn’t have a psychological effect on me, personally,” Hamilton told media, including RacingNews365.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I didn’t know at the end of the year that we would be where we are; no one anticipated it, but it felt worse naturally.<\/p>\n
“But I was pushing for it, it was like: ‘We can’t fall behind the others in terms of development for the new car,’ because it is a steep learning curve for all of us.<\/p>\n
“So I supported it 100%, and I still think it was the right decision, particularly with where we were with the car, we weren’t fighting for the championship.<\/p>\n
“That just meant it’s been harder to maintain the performance that we have, and I can’t answer the question for the rest of the team, but everyone has stayed really positive in my experience, so I’ve not seen a psychological impact.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton has given a firm denial that Ferrari’s decision to stop aerodynamic development on its car earlier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,2476,578,2479,2477,2480,2478,930,576,577,932,1885,2475,582,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-343938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-daniel-ricciardo","11":"tag-f1","12":"tag-f1-calendar","13":"tag-f1-live","14":"tag-f1-results","15":"tag-f1-standings","16":"tag-ferrari","17":"tag-formula-1","18":"tag-formula1","19":"tag-lewis-hamilton","20":"tag-max-verstappen","21":"tag-motorsport","22":"tag-racing","23":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}