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Lewis Hamilton's start to life at Ferrari has not been a fairytale ride that so many of his fans would have hoped for. Except for the moment in China when the driver secured pole and the win in the sprint, there have not been many moments worth remembering.
Coupled with the kind of season Lewis Hamilton had in 2024 at Mercedes against George Russell, questions are being asked of the driver. While the 7x champion has been transparent and claimed that he doesn't expect things to change for the rest of the season, it does appear that he has already made the biggest breakthrough.
The first step to solving any problem is accepting that there is one. When Lewis Hamilton admitted during the F1 Saudi Arabian GP that he might have been 'too set in his ways,' it was him accepting for the first time in the ground effect era that maybe he needed to change a few things.
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Even though it took him four years, it's about time the driver did so, and with that, the focus would be on molding himself and not the car to get the best from the package.
Lewis Hamilton's history of adaptation
One of the bigger questions this season has been around Lewis Hamilton's 'adaptation' to the package that Ferrari has built. There have been timelines drawn by different pundits on when they expect the driver to finally get to grips with his new home.
There is, however, one thing that we're missing here, and that is the fact that in Hamilton, we have a driver who has gone through multiple regulations with different demands and continued to excel.
He started his career in 2007 when grooved tires and refueling were a thing. This was followed by the introduction of slicks and KERS in 2009. In 2010, refueling was outlawed, and the focus moved to tire management during races. In 2011, Pirelli's fragile tires replaced Bridgestone, and the dynamics of racing were changed completely.
This has continued into the 2014 F1 season, when the V6 Turbo hybrids were introduced, and since then as well, there have been changes made to the technical regulations that demand adjustments and changes in driving style.
During all this time, Lewis Hamilton has continued to be one of the drivers who one could call the benchmark in F1, and a lot of it comes down to his ability to adapt himself to the challenges in front of him and do so in such a manner that it keeps him at the sharp end of the grid.
The downside of the Mercedes dominance
There's no way to prove that this is the case, but there's certainly a theory behind Lewis Hamilton's struggles. The genesis of it lies with the era of Mercedes dominance from 2014 to 2021. During this time, the kind of success that the driver had was unprecedented.
There was an 8-year period where he drove the car a certain way (the changes from 2016 to 2017 did not demand a massive shift in driving style) and won convincingly. One could argue that Hamilton was the benchmark for the entire grid at the time and set the standard on how to get the most out of an F1 car.
While that is true, the downside is that after driving an F1 car in a certain manner for such a long period, as Lewis Hamilton admitted in Jeddah, he has been set in his own way for some time.
After achieving so much success by using a certain style, he has developed a belief that this is the most optimum approach to go fast in an F1 car. As a result, we've had a lot of chatter about the 'experimental setups' in the ground effect era, where the driver has been trying to bring the car closer to his style rather than molding himself to the car's demands.
The peculiarity of the ground effect cars
The most peculiar thing about these ground-effect cars is that they require a markedly different approach compared to the previous generation. These cars are quite conducive to a driving style where you're very smooth, and the late braking style that Hamilton has employed in the past does not give the same dividend.
From 2021 to 2022, there were drivers who were agile enough to make that change as soon as the regulations first came into effect. Drivers like Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen are noticeably different in the way they drive the cars these days compared to how they used to do it in the previous eras.
Verstappen had the most notable shift when it comes to this, as the way he drove his Red Bull pre-2022 is quite different from what he does now.
Light at the end of a very long tunnel?
If Lewis Hamilton does finally acknowledge that he needs to make changes in his driving style, the next step would be adaptation. Once he's done with the adaptation process, the real challenge begins.
Why? Because the driver in the other Ferrari is Charles Leclerc, arguably one of the best drivers in F1 right now. If Hamilton is comfortable in the car and still finds himself at a deficit to his younger teammate, that might be the point where he would call time on his career.
For now, though, one has to hope that the driver heeds his own advice and starts molding himself to the car, rather than it being the other way round.
