There’s a stark distinction in morale between the 2 sides of the Ferrari storage. Charles Leclerc arrives on the sixth spherical of the championship after the robust efficiency in Jeddah, which earned the Maranello group its first podium of the season. The Monegasque, regardless of the challenges plaguing the SF-25, has discovered another resolution to extract the utmost potential from the automobile whereas ready for the updates to make the automobile extra aggressive.
Lewis Hamilton arrives in Miami with a really totally different spirit. Greater than the lackluster outcomes and the few factors collected within the first 5 Grands Prix of the season, the actual concern is the failure to discover a compromise setup that may improve Lewis Hamilton’s driving fashion. The weekend in Saudi Arabia was emblematic on this sense, marked by a “efficiency melancholy.”
Whereas within the first 4 rounds of the season, the Briton confirmed flashes of competitiveness even throughout the identical race, on the ultra-fast Jeddah monitor he was soundly crushed by his teammate. The sensation is that the seven-time System 1 world champion has not been capable of finding a strong baseline. A constant platform on which to regulate the SF-25’s setup to swimsuit each the motive force’s wants and the monitor traits.
It’s a déjà vu of what occurred at Mercedes when ground-effect vehicles returned. On many weekends, the engineers assigned to Lewis Hamilton’s Silver Arrow operated by trial and error as a substitute of creating the setup from a fundamental configuration. Jeddah is a revealing monitor on this respect. Lewis Hamilton was the pole-sitter and winner of the inaugural GP version there, after considered one of his many all-out battles with Max Verstappen.
The next yr, the primary with the present technical rules, he was sensationally eradicated in Q1. On the time, the discuss was of a setup that made the Mercedes W13 undriveable. On a number of events over the previous three years, the British driver has raced in no man’s land. If with a brand new group he nonetheless faces the identical difficulties he already skilled, it’s honest to ask some questions—maybe unpopular, however on the identical time believable.
Within the ground-effect period, Lewis Hamilton has by no means pushed the perfect automobile on the grid, besides specifically circumstances, similar to Las Vegas or Spa-Francorchamps final season. In hindsight, his teammates, particularly George Russell and Charles Leclerc, regardless of the poor competitiveness of the vehicles, have proven higher efficiency than the Stevenage-born driver.
4 years into steady rules, we marvel if this era of vehicles is actually incompatible with Lewis’s driving fashion. A discomfort identified at Brackley, as defined by Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director. The Englishman’s driving fashion has all the time been characterised by heavy braking adopted by sharp cornering, a way generally known as “V-ing.”
Present vehicles don’t improve this method, as they’re heavy and susceptible to understeer. This makes it unattainable to hold most pace by the apex. When the automobile allowed it, he managed to compensate together with his expertise for the issue in optimizing his energy. Quite the opposite, with tougher vehicles, the handicap has turn into too disruptive to total efficiency.
On this context, the work of the Maranello engineers and technicians is understandably powerful, as there are a lot of elements to think about in defining the setup. First, they need to set up a platform suited to the circuit’s traits. On monitor, the setup should be refined to handle the present problems with the 677 challenge, and at last, compromises should be discovered to make the automobile extra snug for Lewis Hamilton to drive.
Within the second Dash Race of the 2025 System 1 season, we’ll see how far the mutual understanding between Ferrari and the British champion has come. Hopefully, the method will likely be fast sufficient to not waste what, at the least in idea, was purported to mark the rebirth of the seven-time F1 world champion. We await the following two days on monitor to study extra.
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