Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari didn’t give him all the information he needed to avoid making a costly strategy error in his first race for the team.
He briefly led the Australian Grand Prix after he did not join other drivers in switching from slicks to intermediate tyres when rain fell during the race. However, when it became clear the conditions were worse than he realised, Hamilton finally came in, losing all the places he had gained and more.He said the rain initially fell on one part of the circuit and he wasn’t aware how bad it was elsewhere.
“It intensified a little bit in the last sector, but the rest of the track was okay,” Hamilton told the official F1 channel. “Obviously I didn’t know where everybody else was.
“I knew people had stopped [in the pits], but ultimately then all of a sudden it started raining and I didn’t know, no one told me that it was raining more elsewhere, and all of a sudden I was faced with it around the rest of the track. It was a bit of an opportunity missed, but I’m glad I kept it on-track.”
After the restart Hamilton gained one place from Pierre Gasly but was passed by his team mate Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri – the latter sweeping around the outside of the Ferrari driver at turn nine.
The communications between Hamilton and his new race engineer Ricardo Adami were not always smooth during the race. Afterwards Hamilton admitted he was still getting to grips with the different settings on the Ferrari steering wheel.
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He was initially unsure where he had scored a point in his first race for Ferrari, being before told he had, in 10th place.
“Overall, not what I was hoping for,” Hamilton admitted. “There was so much to get accustomed to, get used to, with all the switch settings and changes that they were throwing at you.”
However he believes there is clear potential for improvement from the next round in China. “The balance of the car was really very tricky, really tricky today,” he said. “So definitely, I think we can improve that in the next race, hopefully, and get the car in a sweeter spot because I think there’s a lot more potential in the car than what we were able to extract today.”
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2025 Australian Grand Prix
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Esploratore (@esploratore1)
16th March 2025, 7:40
Well, he will have to get used to ferrari messing up strategies!
Anthony Tellier
16th March 2025, 17:23
Looks like the honeymoon is over ….
Cdfemke
17th March 2025, 1:05
That was quick. Ferrari doesnt pamper drivers, it takes getting used to i guess
Armchair Expert (@armchairexpert)
16th March 2025, 8:04
Hamilton should look in the mirror before blaming anybody for their strategy mistakes. Who can forget entering the pitlane when it was closed (Italy 2020), performing practice starts on a live track before the race (Russia 2020), not entering the pitlane when it wasn’t closed, only partially blocked (Saudi Arabia 2022, while supposedly lesser driver like Hulkenberg managed to do so) or nor pitting for slicks while having nothing to lose running in P14 (Imola 2022). “We win and we lose together” is his motto, yet after only one race with his new team he’s already blaming them publicly.
Diez Cilindros (@diezcilindros)
16th March 2025, 8:05
LH: ‘Is it raining elsewhere?’
Ferrari: ‘Negative, Lewis. Only raining in Charles’ car, his seat is full of water’
Avro Anson (@avroanson)
16th March 2025, 8:25
@diezcilindros – my apologies, I accidently reported your comment.
I loved Charles’ response:
Charles: My seat is full of water.
Engineer: That would be the water.
Charles: Famous words of wisdom.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
16th March 2025, 21:41
@avroanson After sober reflection, I think I can see how this happened and what was intended.
Charles: My seat is full of water. [Is this entirely accounted for by the rain or has my car developed a leak?]
Bryan: That would be the water. [Tried to say “rain” to reassure Charles that his car was fine, missed, and accidentally created a tautology. I don’t think Bryan meant to be Captain Obvious.]
Charles: Famous words of wisdom. [Not having time to understand/guess that the significance of “water” was meant to be “rain”, the sentence was interpreted literally.]
The trouble is that F1 teams don’t have the luxury of anyone involved having half a day to think about the meaning of a radio utterance before reacting to it.
Cdfemke
17th March 2025, 1:06
I think he ment to say water from the drinking bottle. Rain generally doesnt get into the cockpit unless the car is stationary
BasCB (@bascb)
16th March 2025, 8:29
:-) Yeah, Ferrari gave us some good comedy moments there today. It shows this team really has its weakest spot on strategy calling part, especially with the weather (I guess Hamilton is still learning with them and they miss Sainz calling the strategy right …)
Avro Anson (@avroanson)
16th March 2025, 8:23
Maybe his engineer was a bit intimidated after Lewis told him several times to stop talking?
BasCB (@bascb)
16th March 2025, 8:30
Very clearly they are still learning how to work best together. Hamilton did say it very politely though.
SpaFrancorchamps (@spafrancorchamps)
16th March 2025, 9:58
We see this from Hamilton all the time. He doesn’t want his engineer to talk to him. But then gets angry towards his engineer for not giving enough information the moment it goes wrong.
That said, Adami is the worst engineer in F1.
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
16th March 2025, 12:11
He was absolutely right to tell him to stop with the “rookie” instructions as if he were taking a driving test. Hamilton knows his car inside out and has even customized his steering wheel setup, as recently highlighted by Giorgio Piola. Adami kept insisting on using K1 mode for maximum deployment because of the increased braking and recharging in the rain. Hamilton was well aware of this but he simply wasn’t close enough to make use of it.
Jonathan
16th March 2025, 12:32
This reminds me of Sam Micheal when he joined Mclaren in 2010,he started talking to Lewis like he was a Rookie on how to drive even though Lewis been with the team for years. Lewis utter those famous words before Kimi leave me alone I know What Im doing…The relationship never recovered.With Sam Micheal becoming chief of operation, Lewis endured a series of weird pitstop misfortune..after which he quietly retired from F1.Let us hope Adamin checks himself
HW Small
16th March 2025, 9:39
Typical, having told his mechanic to stop giving him information for the entire race, LH complains that his mechanic is not giving him enough information!
BenHur
16th March 2025, 11:01
There’s always someone else to blame. Deities never make mistakes.
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
16th March 2025, 17:11
And his detractors queue up to point any and everything out he does. Have to ask why you think Lewis is any different from any other driver. A familiar reason probably
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
16th March 2025, 11:03
In case of wet races they should agree beforehand: don’t give me info regarding car settings, but weather forecast is paramount.
Then again, ferrari engineers aren’t highly regarded.
Edvaldo
16th March 2025, 12:39
Yeah but he said it about settings on the car. Which the engineer was talking A LOT.
Weather is a whole different picture.
At the end who got it right was Norris, and only because he almost crashed.
grat
16th March 2025, 13:16
Mechanic?!? /sigh
Riccard
16th March 2025, 11:15
Both Ferraris stayed out, so it looks like a team decision rather than a Hamilton one
Granted he could potentially have overruled, but in changing conditions like today drivers have an incomplete picture, do you do really look to the team.
Fred Fedurch
16th March 2025, 11:58
Really? You signed with Ferrari.
PeteB (@peteb)
16th March 2025, 13:37
It was always going to be one of the biggest issues with Hamilton joining Ferrari. He’s not a driver who takes the lead when it comes to strategy (unlike Russell) but Ferrari are absolutely useless at it. If you’re in the lower end of the points, today’s weather was a perfect opportunity to get a good result but of course Ferrari got it wrong like they always do.
J765
16th March 2025, 14:01
Welcome to Ferrari!
I really don’t understand how they spend thousands of hours in the simulator, yet they don’t simulate full races with their track engineer to know what he needs and what he doesn’t.
AlanD
16th March 2025, 15:07
J, that’s a very good point. I don’t thnk there’s any limits on simulator time, but I guess it is difficult to anticipate all the possible scenarios. Since they’ve known for a yrear that LH was going to Ferrari, they could have spent that year listening to his radio transmissions with Bono and working out what info he needs and what annoys him. Just like the driver has to learn the car, the race engineer needs to learn the driver.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
16th March 2025, 21:44
J765, this wouldn’t even need simulator time. Playing a F1 game with open mics and a realistic steering wheel/pedal set-up should enable this to be simulated, without needing to eat into the simulator restriction.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
17th March 2025, 3:34
arguably the simulator is really only good for coordination and learning certain behaviors. Its nothing like real life.
who ever is in charge of strategy should probably have a book of scenarios that cover most of the last say 20 years of F1. And the team from maybe Fred on down involved in the strategy calls should be performing simulations as well, and scoring their own performance, to see where they can improve themselves.
Because at the end of the day, if something isn’t well practiced, it will take time to figure it out, and that time could be the difference between a 1 or 2 turns and missing a pit-in.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
17th March 2025, 3:36
I believe Lando eluded to the fact that his own team was practicing extensively in the off-season to get better reaction times on strategy calls.
Jay371
18th March 2025, 3:45
All these are good points but I do think things can be overdone. Lewis has never spent all that much time in simulators, he thinks it is only good for certain things. I agree because he has had a long career and there is such a thing as burn-out. Alonso is similiar and still driving F1 cars well.
Jordi Casademunt (@casjo)
16th March 2025, 16:31
Ferrari might want to hire a strategist who understands the effect a wet track has on a car running on slick tyres.
Femke
17th March 2025, 1:09
They do need good driver feedback tho, on grip levels. That was lacking bigtime
Nikos (@exeviolthor)
17th March 2025, 8:01
Generally speaking, the drivers decide if it is time to switch to slicks and the teams decide if it is time to switch to inters.
The driver cannot know where and how much it rains if they have not reached that part of the circuit yet.
The call that Ferrari made was very risky, but it was an understandable one. If it was raining so much that the race had to be red flagged then they would have got a 1-2 finish.
Pjotr (@pietkoster)
16th March 2025, 21:57
Well the first talks with Ferrari management: saying anything negative in the press about Ferrari or strategy is not done, Lewis. You bite the hand that feeds you…
Cdfemke
17th March 2025, 1:10
Nobody is bigger than ferrari. Especially no drivers. This is what you learn driving for the red team
Ajaxn
16th March 2025, 22:27
What makes this worse is that SKY and the other teams knew the rain coming was going to be level 3, [where level 1 is a light drizzle].
The other teams were prepared and even knew it would last longer than a single lap. Yet Hamiton’s race engineer did not have this critical information to pass on.
I would like to know if Ferrari prepared for the rain by adding extra rear down-force for qualifying, for park ferma conditions, only to see that preparation scuppered with the first red flag. Was this question asked by anyone?
I guess they thought the extra down force would favor them in the wet, and yet they didn’t take advantage of their set up.
Riccard
17th March 2025, 19:05
Actually, his race engineer told him it would be class 4. You can see this in the “I’m learning the car” article, which has a transcript.
Adami:
“In two laps, will be class four, lasting only two laps.”
“Spots of rain in the pit lane, for info.”
“Two laps to heavy rain, short and sharp, heavy rain, lasting two laps.”
Hamilton:
“Okay, understood.”
Jim from US (@jimfromus)
17th March 2025, 1:30
Ferrari is a dumpster fire. HAM tells race engineers to stop talking to him. So they do. Then complains he wasn’t informed.
LEC completely spins in the rain. Ferrari doesn’t call either driver in for inters. At a minimum split the decision. Going to be a long season for them. Oh, and the car isn’t that good on top of it all.
Jim from US (@jimfromus)
17th March 2025, 1:36
Wife just reminded me that Ferrari engineers can engineer the water bottle let alone the car. The water you are sitting in must be the water. Bodes well for the 2026 engine design.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
17th March 2025, 3:45
the problem was Lewis is still figuring out the car and the settings he can control, and the amount of feedback he can accept is severely limited because hes concentrating on understanding the car at the moment.
his engineer was more than likely covering himself, and might have actually had some level of insight, but the two are not really ‘sympathetic’ and working on the same page.
It takes time before you can commit enough tasks to muscle memory / autonomic reflex. To the point where there is very little question about the right course of action and the car and it’s behaviors are well understood/known and mapped to memory. At this level Lewis can then take in more feedback which has a basis that is not sitting in his relative field of view.
I think the best thing Adami can do right now is facilitate Lewis understanding of the car, to the point of literally being with him as much as possible and sharing as much information as possible. At the end of the day the car has to become an extension of Lewis himself, much like a swordsman, his sword is an extension of himself. Until the ‘foreignness’ goes away, its just going to take Lewis some time sorting it out.
If I were Adami, i would be helping Lewis go over his race data, and try to help him understand his deficiencies and possible ways he can address this the next time hes in the car. But there are only so many tasks one person can take on, while at the same time trying to learn the car. Especially seeing as how Lewis didnt really get a good race run in testing, pre season.
N
17th March 2025, 12:29
“HAM tells race engineers to stop talking to him. So they do.”
He didn’t tell them to stop talking to him, he told his engineer to stop repeating the same message, and they didn’t.
Asking them to stop telling about a car setting he’s already aware of, doesn’t also mean don’t tell me about the changing weather conditions.