Jan 30, 2026, 03:31 AM ET<\/p>\n
Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari has had a better start to F1 testing than last year, as he praised his Italian team for the “amazing” mileage hit on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Hamilton got his first dry stint in Barcelona’s private preseason test on day four, with the seven-time world champion and teammate Charles Leclerc making the most of it with 172 laps combined.<\/p>\n
Last year in Bahrain – Hamilton’s first test with Ferrari after a blockbuster move from Mercedes – both driver and team were plagued by unreliability.<\/p>\n
Lewis Hamilton on track in the Ferrari SF-26.\u00a0Andrea Diodato\/NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n
“When you come to the test, you always want to get a lot of mileage, like today I did 85 laps in the morning, which is amazing,” Hamilton said. “And that’s really down to all the people at the factory who’ve done such a great job to make sure the car so far is really reliable. So, you know, last year we had a worse start to testing.<\/p>\n
“So this is actually, considering it’s a completely new band of rules, it’s better than we’ve experienced in the past. So I’m really hopeful that continues.”<\/p>\n
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Ferrari also displayed encouraging pace on Thursday, although Mercedes already appear the team to beat.<\/p>\n
Sources confirmed to ESPN that George Russell set a fastest lap of 1:16.445 on Thursday, which was 0.636 seconds faster than Kimi Antonelli’s morning benchmark and 1.778 seconds faster than the Ferrari of Leclerc, which was third fastest overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 30, 2026, 03:31 AM ET Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari has had a better start to F1 testing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-442627","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-f1","11":"tag-formula-1","12":"tag-formula1","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442627","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=442627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}