There’s never been a more spectacular driver switch than Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari.

The statistics don’t lie. This is a marriage of the greatest driver of all time with history’s greatest grand prix team.

It’s blockbuster. It’s sensational. And on paper it should be history-making.

But so far this year it’s been almost exclusively underwhelming.

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Hamilton has been comprehensively beaten by teammate Charles Leclerc, whose reputation has been enhanced by how comfortably he’s kept a handle on the well-decorated newcomer.

Signs of progress have been tempered by wild inconsistency, which has slowly eroded the unbridled positivity with which the season started.

The nadir was reached in Hungary before the mid-season break.

At a circuit for which Hamilton holds every meaningful record, he was knocked out in Q2 and lumbered to his first scoreless finish of the year.

“They probably need to change drivers,” he lamented after qualifying 12th, having described himself as “absolutely useless” on a day Leclerc took an improbable pole position.

After the race he cryptically referred to “a lot going on in the background that’s not great” before even hinting that there was a chance he wouldn’t return after the mid-season break.

“I look forward to coming back. Hopefully I will be back.”

The honeymoon is over. After just 14 weekends, the question is whether the marriage can last.

Lewis Hamilton after getting knocked out in qualifying in Hungary. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)Source: AP

‘THERE’LL BE SOME TEARS’

Hamilton hasn’t shied away from his difficulties this season.

“The last god-knows-how-many seasons have been hard in their own way,” he said ahead of the previous race in Hungary, per Sky Sports. “This one has definitely been the most intense one, I would say, just from a work perspective.

“Integrating into a new culture and into a new team — it’s not gone smoothly in all areas, and it’s been a real battle.

“I definitely need to get away and recharge, be around the kids, laugh, let go.

“I’m sure there’ll be some tears at some point, and I think that’s really healthy.”

The tears will presumably be reserved for any look at his season statistics.

The headline is grim: no poles, no wins, no podiums.

It’s the first time in his career he’s got this deep into the season without a grand prix podium trophy, though he does have some silverware for winning the sprint in China and finishing third in the short race in Miami.

But his head-to-head comparison with Leclerc is worse.

Lewis Hamilton’s vital statistics, rounds 1 to 14

Qualifying result: 8.0 average (best: 4th)

Qualifying head to head: trailing Leclerc 4-10

Qualifying differential: 2.9 places behind Leclerc

Time differential: 0.169 seconds slower than Leclerc

Race result: 6.5 average (best: 4th)

Race head to head: trailing Leclerc 2-11

Race differential: 1.5 places behind Leclerc

Points: trailing Leclerc 109-151 (42-58 per cent)

His qualifying stats are particularly alarming.

Hamilton is the sport’s most prolific qualifier, having claimed more poles than any other driver in Formula 1 history.

While Leclerc has a well-earnt reputation as an extremely fast one-lap driver — he’s amassed 27 poles despite rarely having the quickest car at his disposal — no-one could have expected such a one-sided tally.

His average deficit of 0.169 seconds is far from an obliteration, but it puts Ferrari fifth on the list of closest teammates, behind the drivers at Williams, McLaren, Sauber and Haas.

But put another way, the only drivers qualifying more distantly to their teammates than Hamilton are Jack Doohan and Franco Colapinto at Alpine, Liam Lawson at Racing Bulls, Lance Stroll at Aston Martin, Andrea Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes and Yuki Tsunoda at Red Bull Racing.

In other words, he’s faring better than only those drivers with asterisks — they’re either rookies, driving Red Bull Racing’s deeply troubled car or Lance Stroll being belted by Fernando Alonso.

Charles Leclerc is comfortably keeping Lewis Hamilton in his box. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP)Source: AFP

THE UPSHOT

But averages don’t tell the complete story.

Visualise a chart that plots the qualifying gap between Hamilton and Leclerc for each race. The points are mostly on Leclerc’s side of the horizontal axis. Some of them are very deep on Leclerc’s side, reflecting a bigger margin, though increasingly they’re closer to the middle line. Only four of the 14 dots are in Hamilton’s territory.

If you draw a trend line between all the points — a line of best fit from round 1 to round 14 — it slopes gently towards Hamilton, swinging 0.128 seconds in his favour.

That means Hamilton has been closing the gap over the course of the season.

That was clearly the case before the Belgium-Hungary double-header before the break, where his momentum was halted by a set of poor qualifying results.

If you remove those two races from the chart, the trend line is sharply more positive.

Hamilton’s gap to Leclerc, trend line

Season overall: Hamilton improving by 0.128 seconds

Before Belgium: Hamilton improving by 0.297 seconds

Of course this doesn’t mean Hamilton will necessarily overcome Leclerc eventually. Nor should Belgium and Hungary simply be ignored because they buck a more positive trend.

But it is a counterpoint to the idea that Hamilton has been meandering rudderless throughout the year.

It’s also worth considering that Belgium and Hungary weren’t as bad as his headline results made them seem.

In Spa-Francorchamps he suffered a Q1 knockout in sprint qualifying and again in grand prix qualifying.

On his first lap in SQ1 he was half a second quicker than Leclerc before a mistake at Stavelot ruined his lap. With his second lap he had set an identical time to Leclerc in the first two sectors before a spin at the final chicane knocked him out of the session.

In grand prix qualifying he had set a time just 0.029 seconds slower than Leclerc in Q1 — more than fast enough to make it through to the next segment — but had the lap deleted for exceeding track limits at Raidillon. His next-best lap wasn’t good enough to make it through to Q2.

They were all Hamilton mistakes, but it was clear he was on the pace.

In Hungary he was knocked out of Q2 on genuine pace. His margin to Leclerc was 0.247 seconds at the time he was eliminated, but he was only 0.015 seconds short making it through to Q3, which would have meaningfully changed the complexion of his weekend.

Lewis Hamilton in happier times. (Photo by Greg Baker / AFP)Source: AFP

REASON 1: A DIFFICULT TRANSITION

But even if there’s some hope in the trend, Hamilton has undeniably been shown the way by Leclerc so far.

There are a few explanations.

The first is that there’s never been a more difficult time to change teams in Formula 1.

The ground-effect era has produced a series of extremely specific, particular cars. Combined with the power units, for which development has been frozen for years, each team’s package is distinct to drive.

That needs to be considered in the context of Hamilton having been a Mercedes-backed driver at British-based teams for his entire career.

Team principal Frédéric Vasseur, who has defended Hamilton from critics all season, said it’s clear that the difficulty of changing teams was greater than he and Hamilton had anticipated.

“I think perhaps that we underestimate the challenge for Lewis at the beginning of the season,” the Ferrari boss told the F1 website. “He spent almost 10 years with McLaren and then 10 years with Mercedes — that’s almost 20 years with Mercedes in the same environment.

“It was a huge change for Lewis in terms of culture, in terms of people around him, in terms of software, in terms of car, in terms of every single topic was a big change perhaps that we underestimate this, Lewis and myself.”

Hamilton had talked about the immense challenge at the beginning of the year, when he gave himself months, not weeks, to adjust.

“I’m back at square one,” he said in Melbourne. “I’m under no assumptions that it will be easy. It is not.

“I’m still learning this new car that’s quite a lot different to what I’ve driven for all my previous career in the sense of Mercedes power.

“Coming into Ferrari power, it’s something quite new — different vibration, different feel, different way of working.

“The whole team works completely differently. I was just sitting looking at the race trace from last year, and it’s upside down compared to the previous one.”

Supporting this theory is Hamilton’s improving trajectory, as detailed above.

So too is the man he replaced: Carlos Sainz.

After a highly competitive campaign last year, Sainz has struggled for traction at Williams, where he’s being comfortably shown up by Alex Albon — though bad luck has masked undeniably better progress, with the Spaniard a much closer match for the Thai than Hamilton is for Leclerc.

Lewis Hamilton hasn’t slipped seamlessly into his Ferrari. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

REASON 2: A BAD RULE SET

The second explanation is that Hamilton simply does not get along with the current generation of car.

Hamilton’s last genuinely competitive season was 2021, when he was controversially beaten to what would have been his eighth world championship.

His downturn the following year coincided with Mercedes’s own decline as it struggled to build a car for this rule set.

But Hamilton’s slow going at Ferrari suggests Mercedes wasn’t his only problem.

Because a ground-effect car generates most of its downforce via the floor, it must be configured to be very stiff and with as consistent and flat a ride height and attitude as possible.

The current car doesn’t dive down under brakes or sit back on acceleration.

That’s important because it means the front axle isn’t loaded up as significantly as it used to be when a driver hits the brakes hard.

Hamilton’s driving style is built around his feel on the brakes. His trick — if it’s useful to think about it in such terms — is to load up the front axle so that the rear can begin to rotate into the corner before he’s released the brakes.

But because the current car doesn’t load up the front axle in the same way, it can’t give him the same response, muting his advantage.

What’s worse for Hamilton is that Ferrari doesn’t appear to have designed cars with this method in mind. It’s built its cars around different drivers with different strengths.

To effectively turn a Ferrari requires mastering engine braking, which influences the rear axle. Leclerc has learnt to play in this space by subtly overlapping the throttle and brakes, for example.

That represents a significant reprogramming of decades of Hamilton’s muscle memory.

Supporting this theory is Hamilton’s inconsistency — in some circumstances and in some conditions he can get the most from the car, but more often than not he’s falling short.

Hamilton wouldn’t be the only driver to succumb to this set of rules.

Daniel Ricciardo’s career faded similarly after the Australian failed to transition his driving style to ground effect.

Like Hamilton, he occasionally had good days when things clicked, but in general he was behind Norris in 2022 and Yuki Tsunoda in 2023–24.

But neither he nor Ricciardo looked capable of taming this generation of car consistently. The highs were inevitably punctuated with inexplicable lows that would defy any sense of momentum.

“Every time, every time,” Hamilton lamented after qualifying 12th in Hungary just days after expressing optimism about his progress in Belgium.

Lewis Hamilton is in the longest podium drought of his career.. (Photo by Christophe SIMON / AFP)Source: AFP

REASON 3: THE SPORT HAS GOT AWAY FROM HIM

If you subscribe to the idea that it’s just this rule set, the good news is the chassis and engine regulations will be thrown into the bin at the end of the year. Dramatically new cars are in store for next season.

But the Ricciardo parallel is also a cautionary tale.

While the regulations are one part of his story, he also talked about his driving style fundamentally not gelling with the way McLaren built its cars. Traits crossed over between regulation cycles.

Red Bull Racing subsequently revealed that it could see in Ricciardo’s simulator data the after-effects of having had to contort his natural driving style around a car that didn’t work for him.

He was eventually able to unpick most of his problems, but by then it was too late. He wasn’t able to prove he could get back to his best at Racing Bulls, and he was turfed late last year.

The then 35-year-old wondered at the time whether the game had simply got away from him.

“I was able to do some moments of greatness this year, but it was trickier to do it week in, week out,” he told Sky Sports. “Maybe that’s [being] 35. Maybe the competition’s getting better and better. Who knows.

“Sometimes [races] felt a lot more effortless.”

Having celebrated his 40th birthday in January, age is a question that has dogged Hamilton throughout his recent struggles at both Mercedes and Ferrari.

Hamilton’s gloomy recent commentary has also raised the question of motivation — though team boss Vasseur insists the seven-time champion needs no incentive to perform.

“I don’t need to motivate him; he’s frustrated but not demotivated,” he said, per ESPN, insisting that the Briton’s post-session pessimism should be read as an immediate heart-on-sleeve emotional reaction to disappointing results, not an insight into his long-term thinking.

“He’s frustrated, not demotivated.” (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP)Source: AFP

All three reasons are at play to some extent, which in turn raises the stakes significantly for 2026.

Hamilton’s Ferrari switch was always about next year, when the team hopes is can re-establish itself as a leader with the help of the changing rules.

This season, like his 2013 Mercedes switch, was always supposed to be preparatory. It was only the team’s strong end to last season that dangerously inflated expectation of more from team and driver this year.

But something else has changed too in the last eight months.

While he had nothing to prove after leaving Mercedes with a swag of F1’s biggest records, no-one expected his transition — for all the reasons above — to be this difficult.

Suddenly there are questions in need of answers.

Suddenly the stakes for 2026 have been raised.

Nothing can unseat Hamilton from the table of Formula 1 greats. Nothing can invalidate everything he’s achieved. His legacy is secure.

But what don’t we understand about the seven-time champion? Has his Maranello move incidentally identified some hitherto unknown weakness? Has he clung to F1 for too long? Has age caught up with the seven-time champion?

Is there an eighth world title in him?

“I think if he has a car underneath him that he has confidence in, that does what he wants, then yes,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff argued, per the F1 website.

“If he has a car that’s not giving him the feedback that he wants — and that was the Mercedes of the past few years and that seems to be the Ferrari, and even worse — then not.

“But you ask me whether he has it. He definitely has it.”

But only Hamilton himself can settle the question in 2026.