How long will Hamilton need to find feet at Ferrari?

Yahoo

18-03-2025

The 2025 season began in thrilling fashion as Lando Norris beat Max Verstappen to win an incident-packed Australian Grand Prix.
Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton finished 10th in his first race for Ferrari.
Changeable conditions led to a series of crashes, three safety cars and an aborted start.
BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions after the race in Melbourne.
Will McLaren allow Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to race? They always say the drivers are free to race, however whenever they get near on track, drivers are told to hold positions. Will this rob us of the only championship battle if the McLaren is so dominant? - Martin
There's a simple answer to this question - yes. McLaren's philosophy is that the drivers are free to race, with the caveat that the team's interests always come first.
What that means is that the drivers have rules - Norris and Piastri can compete but they cannot risk each other's cars.
That's what explains the order, midway through the Australian Grand Prix, for the cars to hold station until they had cleared some lapped traffic and the team had a better understanding of the incoming wet weather.
Team principal Andrea Stella said: "During the race at some stage we had to go relatively soon through some backmarkers while the cars were close together and the conditions on track were still a little tricky with intermediate tyres that were running down a bit in terms of their rubber, and at the same time receiving some updates on the weather forecast.
"That led us to close, for a short period, the internal racing until we had clarity as to the weather prediction, what this meant for how we should use the tyres, and until we had closed the matter of overtaking the backmarkers. Once this was completed, we re-opened the racing."
It was clear from the tone of Piastri's reply that he was not that happy about being told to hold station - at that stage he had closed to within a second of Norris and was challenging for the lead, claiming he was quicker.
Once the drivers were allowed to race again, though, Norris extended the gap, and then Piastri made a mistake at Turn Six trying to keep up.
That suggests Norris had previously been managing his pace to contain the wear on his intermediates. And Piastri admitted his tyres were too far gone by then to challenge.
The overall philosophy was explained by Norris after qualifying.
"There are clearly rules we cannot cross," he said. "Both cars must always stay in the race, but we're both competitors. That's clear.
"We both want to fight for a win and victories. But there are boundaries around the car - just a little more space here and there. We're free to race, free to try and win races.
"But what won us the constructors' last year was how we helped one another and how we kept things clean."
How long do you predict it will take Lewis Hamilton to find his feet at Ferrari, as in to at least match Charles Leclerc, if he does? - Oliver
Since Hamilton joined Ferrari, he has consistently referred to the learning process he will have to go through before he can perform at his optimum.
Over the race weekend in Australia, the word that kept recurring was "building" - a reference to the accumulation of knowledge he requires before he can extract the best from himself within the context of Ferrari's car and team.
This involves the behaviour of the car on track, the operations of the car's systems - two things that are interlinked - and his communications with the team, both in the car and out of it.
Through the weekend in Melbourne, there were obvious signs that these were not yet at their most fluent.
Hamilton said: "I've learned a huge amount this weekend. There's a lot to take away from it. And, yeah, I've got some changes I've got to make for next week, and I'll see how it goes."
How long will this process take? Well, as the saying goes, how long is a piece of string?
The question contains an assumption, though. Hamilton will certainly believe he can "at least match Charles Leclerc". In fact, he'll believe he can beat him on balance over a season. Of course he will.
But Leclerc is richly talented, and possibly the fastest driver over one lap in F1.
Good as Hamilton obviously is, this is no easy challenge.
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What's wrong with the second Red Bull seat? No-one has performed well in it for a while now. It's like it's cursed - Niko
Max Verstappen is a genius-level driver who is clearly an all-time great. Anyone who got into the second Red Bull would know they faced the fight of their lives to come out on top against the Dutchman - and that includes the other recognised top-level drivers in F1 at the moment.
And within that reality lies the inherent contradiction of the approach Red Bull are taking to their second seat.
They don't want a driver who can challenge Verstappen. They want someone who can provide enough support to get in the mix with his rivals and take points off them, easing Verstappen's path to the drivers' title and the team's to the constructors' championship.
The problem is that they keep picking second-string drivers to do a job that only drivers of a higher quality are able to do.
In a tightly-packed field, having a driver who is at best 0.3 seconds a lap off Verstappen is going to mean someone qualifies close to the back of the group of the top four teams, and therefore is rarely going to be of much help.
For this season, they could have had Carlos Sainz - a driver who actually very marginally out-qualified Verstappen when they were team-mates at Toro Rosso back in 2015.
But they rejected him on the basis of the potential tension it would cause in their team. Instead, they picked Sergio Perez - a decision that baffled many people in F1.
It backfired on them when the Mexican had a second poor season, and they had to pay him off. Now they have picked Liam Lawson, a rookie with only 11 races' experience and of as-yet-unproven quality.
Thrown in at the deep end in Melbourne, Lawson struggled, to say the least.
The situation is exacerbated because the car is developed following Verstappen's feedback.
He wants a very sharp front end, and has the ability to cope with the loose rear this inevitably creates. But only drivers of the very highest level of talent could cope with those characteristics, and only drivers with the very highest level of mental strength could cope with racing Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton fought for the title in his rookie season. Is that still possible for the right driver in the right car or have times, processes and cars moved on since then? - Doug
There is no question that moving to a new team presents a driver with a series of challenges that make his life more difficult - as explained above.
Hamilton, of course, famously fought for the title in his debut season with McLaren in 2007, but that was after meticulous preparation and thousands of kilometres of testing, which made him what is widely regarded as the best prepared rookie in history.
It's been a while since a driver has immediately contended for the championship after switching teams, but then all the title battles in recent years have been between teams whose drivers have been with them for some time.
The last time a driver new to a team fought for the title was 2010, when Fernando Alonso not only won his first race for Ferrari, but took the title battle to the wire. Had it not been for an infamously catastrophic strategy error at the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi, he would have been champion.
Jenson Button was also on the fringes of the title fight that season, after moving from Brawn to McLaren.
It's hard to form conclusions from that, though, because it's so long ago. F1 cars have become significantly more complex since then, and drivers have less time in terms of pre-season testing to prepare.
Having said that, perhaps one should consider another year of Alonso's career.
In 2023, he joined Aston Martin from Alpine, and he was outstanding from the start. He was Verstappen's biggest challenger for the first part of the season, took six podiums in the first eight races, came close to winning in Monaco, and was outstanding all year, even as the team fell from competitiveness.
So, it's hard to argue against the idea that if a driver is good enough - and Hamilton obviously is - it is possible.
Aston Martin have invested a lot of money in people, facilities and resources. Does money guarantee success in F1? - Anil
Money is required to succeed in F1, but it does not guarantee success.
The example always held up on this subject is Toyota's F1 programme, which ran from 2002-9.
It is widely regarded to have had the biggest budget ever, but the team failed to win a single race.
There were a bunch of reasons for this - and never having a true top-level driver was certainly one of them.
But most would agree the fundamental issue was that corporate Toyota was too involved in the team, with too many layers and strictures of management, depriving it of the dexterity and fleet-footedness required of any F1 team operating at the highest level.
At its heart, F1 success is about finding the right people, putting them in the right places, and empowering them to produce the best of themselves. An approach perfectly demonstrated by McLaren's rise from backmarkers to world champions in the last couple of years.
As Alonso said in Australia, Aston Martin now have all that is required for success.
They have a state-of-the-art new factory - including a driver-in-the-loop simulator, and a wind tunnel that has just become operational - and have signed Adrian Newey, the sport's greatest ever designer, to lead an expensively assembled technical team.
But now they have to put all that together and prove they can compete with teams that have been at the front for years.
"The package is completed now," Alonso said. "We will need time. This is not football. Football is very easy - you take the best pitch, the best manager, the best players and eventually you win maybe the next match.
"In F1, you can have the best facilities, the best people, but you still need time to put the ingredients together and win, and we have so many examples in F1 history."
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