Over the past 20 years, several drivers have arrived at Ferrari as world champions, only to fail to replicate their success for the Prancing Horse. Lewis Hamilton says he is determined to break that streak.
Since Ferrari last won a drivers’ championship with Kimi Raikkonen in 2007, the team has boasted Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel – plus Raikkonen for a second stint – as world champions who have joined and then failed to add to their championship tallies. Hamilton said the two week break since the last race has allowed him time to carry out multiple meetings with Ferrari personnel, including delivering documents to the team for discussion and feedback relating to what he feels he needs to be successful.
“The reason for it is that I see a huge amount of potential within this team,” said Hamilton, who won his record-equaling seven world championships with McLaren and Mercedes.
“The passion – nothing comes close to that. But it’s a huge organization, and there are a lot of moving parts. And not all of them are firing on all the cylinders that they need to be.
“That’s ultimately why the team has not had the success that I think it deserves. So, I feel that it’s my job to challenge absolutely every area, to challenge everybody in the team — particularly the guys that are at the top who are making the decisions.
“If you look at the team over the last 20 years, they’ve had amazing drivers: Kimi, Fernando, Sebastian—all world champions. However, they didn’t win a world championship [since 2007]. And I refuse for that to be the case with me.
“So, I’m going the extra mile. I’ve been very fortunate to have had experiences in two other great teams. While things are different because there’s a different culture and everything, I think if you take the same path all the time, you get the same results. So I’m just challenging certain things.
“They’ve been incredibly responsive. We’ve been improving in so many areas – through marketing, through everything we are delivering for sponsors, the way the engineers continue to work. There’s still a lot of improvements to be made, but they’ve been very responsive. Ultimately, I’m just trying to create allies within the organization and get them geed-up – get them pushing.
“I’m here to win. It’s crunch time. I truly believe in the potential of this team. I really believe they can win multiple world championships moving forward. They already have an amazing legacy. But during my time, that’s my sole goal.”
Ferrari arrives at the Belgian Grand Prix with a new rear suspension that ran during a filming day at Mugello last week, and while Hamilton says little could be learned in that scenario, he believes the Sprint format could also delay the team fully understanding the extent of the gains.
“We’ll get to test the suspension tomorrow, and I’m sure there’s going to be learnings from it,” he said. “We’ll figure out how to fine-tune it and try to extract performance from it. On the simulator, there’s no difference. But I’m sure across different circuits, perhaps there’ll be benefits.
“For me, the positive thing is arriving at the filming day where you see that new bits are coming. You see that we are getting development. Because in general, we had an upgraded floor in Bahrain. Then it was quite some time before we got another upgrade – I think it was Austria. And pace-wise, it wasn’t necessarily what I thought we would have.
“If you look at some of the other teams, they bring small pieces every single weekend, like Red Bull often do or Mercedes do, for example. Whereas these are more like big chunks along the way. So I was just really happy to see that there clearly is a big push back at the factory. There are a lot of changes, and then to see the results of those changes takes time. So I was just really grateful to see that we got new parts. We’ll try and put them to use this weekend.
“We don’t have a lot of time, so you need to double up. You need to make sure you get as much information from both cars. You need to do the whole session. If it’s wet, then that really hurts your learning. But in terms of fine-tuning the car, it’s highly unlikely we’re going to fully optimize it during this weekend. It’ll probably be something we’re optimizing over the next few weekends.”
