{"id":535681,"date":"2026-03-14T10:19:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T10:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/535681\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T10:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T10:19:09","slug":"lewis-hamilton-believes-ferrari-have-made-a-step-forward-as-he-identifies-main-focus-for-2026-chinese-grand-prix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/535681\/","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton believes Ferrari have ‘made a step forward’ as he identifies ‘main focus’ for 2026 Chinese Grand Prix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Hamilton believes Ferrari have “made a step forward” this weekend after the Briton and team mate Charles Leclerc secured second-row starts for the Chinese Grand Prix.<\/p>\n

The seven-time World Champion finished third fastest during Qualifying on Saturday<\/a> and will start behind Mercedes duo Kimi Antonelli and George Russell for Sunday’s 56-lap race in Shanghai.<\/p>\n

Hamilton<\/a> was only 0.351s behind Antonelli in the classification, a much smaller gap than Mercedes previously had over the field at the season-opener in Australia last weekend.<\/p>\n

While Hamilton believes Russell’s Q3 car problems<\/a> might have contributed to the gap being smaller, he admitted that the Scuderia were moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n

“I do take it with a pinch of salt because I don’t think George got a consistent bunch of runs and I think maybe he would have been a little bit quicker had he had consistent runs,” said Hamilton.<\/p>\n

“But either way, we’ll take it and I think we have improved the car a tiny bit. We haven’t changed or upgraded the car, it’s not like we’ve truly halved the gap but we made a step forward.”<\/p>\n

Hamilton challenged for the lead in Saturday’s Sprint having gone wheel-to-wheel with eventual winner Russell, but believes it will be a tall order to challenge the Mercedes duo in Sunday’s longer Grand Prix.<\/p>\n

“These guys are going to be rapid in the race as they were today and it’s going to be very hard to keep them at bay, he said.<\/p>\n

“I think I’ve got to figure out a different approach tomorrow to go the distance and have pace throughout the race, that’s my main focus now.<\/p>\n

“The Sprint race wasn’t really good for me performance-wise. It was good at the start but then after that it died off, so I can’t have that tomorrow.”<\/p>\n

Leclerc<\/a>, meanwhile, will start fourth but believes Ferrari’s impressive starts, along with the unique style of racing the current generation of cars offers, anything is possible.<\/p>\n

“With these cars starting P1, P2, P3, P4, after three laps, everything is quite chaotic and we will be there,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I’m happy with where I start and tomorrow in the race I normally feel a little bit better here so I’m looking forward to that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton believes Ferrari have “made a step forward” this weekend after the Briton and team mate Charles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-535681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535681","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=535681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}