{"id":596268,"date":"2026-05-21T14:09:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T14:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/596268\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T14:09:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T14:09:13","slug":"how-hamilton-switched-to-a-different-approach-for-f1-canadian-gp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/596268\/","title":{"rendered":"How Hamilton switched to a “different approach” for F1 Canadian GP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Hamilton<\/a> has tweaked his preparation for the Canadian Grand Prix, having struggled of late in Formula 1.<\/p>\n

Aside from a successful weekend at Shanghai, Hamilton has underperformed relative to Ferrari<\/a> team-mate Charles Leclerc<\/a> so far in 2026, including last time out in Miami.<\/p>\n

The Briton was 0.379s slower in sprint qualifying, then 0.176s down in the main session; he was 24 seconds away from Leclerc in the grand prix before the Monegasque spun, hit the wall and landed a penalty for corner-cutting \u2013 all of which occurred on the final lap.<\/p>\n

Read Also:<\/p>\n

As it happens, the Chinese Grand Prix was the only one Hamilton didn\u2019t prepare for on the simulator; he said he would revert to this approach ahead of Canada as he felt the tool, instead of being helpful, was steering his car away from the ideal set-up, because of its correlation (or lack thereof) with track performance.<\/p>\n

Hamilton described the SF-26\u2019s behaviour on the Floridan track \u2013 especially early in the weekend \u2013 as \u201cnot very snappy into corners\u201d and suffering from \u201cmassive understeer in mid-corner\u201d, hence a shift being required.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m going to have a different approach in the next race, because the way we’re preparing at the moment is not helping,\u201d Hamilton, who\u2019s lying fifth in the drivers\u2019 championship, said following the Miami round.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe go on [the simulator] and then it gets to the track and the car feels different when it gets to the track.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lewis <\/p>\n

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari<\/p>\n

Photo by: Ryan Pierse \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

Asked to expand on how he wasn\u2019t \u2018preparing properly\u2019, the seven-time world champion explained: \u201cWhat I mean by it is that I spend time on the simulator. I don’t like simulators in general. I was in the simulator every week on the build-up to this race, working on correlation constantly. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the sprint weekend, for example, you’ve only got Practice 1. You don’t really want to veer off from your set-up too far, like with a big suspension change. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, I’m not going to go on the simulator right now on the next race. I’ll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff. I’m just going to back away from it for a little bit and see. When we went to China I had the best weekend without sim.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Also:<\/p>\n

Hamilton did clarify that he was happy with the SF-26 besides the set-up problem, with this year\u2019s smaller, nimbler cars suiting his preference better.<\/p>\n

Regardless, Hamilton expects the Canadian GP to be another tricky race for Ferrari, due to the successive 600m, 550m, 1.2km and 650m straights, with the Scuderia\u00a0down on power relative to Mercedes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re losing three to four tenths just on straightline speed, so that’s there and it’s going to be there until we fix it,\u201d Hamilton pointed out.\u00a0\u201cWe need to see if we can cut some drag before the next race.\u201d<\/p>\n

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– The Autosport.com Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton has tweaked his preparation for the Canadian Grand Prix, having struggled of late in Formula 1.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[200712,203809,831,372,59,203808,832,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-596268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-canadian-gp","tag-circuit-gilles-villeneuve","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-gb","tag-how-hamilton-switched-to-a-different-approach-for-f1-canadian-gp","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}