Hamilton ‘doesn’t know wet settings’ for Ferrari with rain forecast for Australian GP

Lewis Hamilton says he ‘doesn’t know which buttons’ to press in his Ferrari having never run in the wet at his new team, as rain is forecast for the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton, who qualified eighth on his Ferrari debut behind team-mate Charles Leclerc, said was unfamiliar with some switches as he continues to adjust to his new team having spent his entire F1 career using Merccedes-powered cars before joining the Scuderia this year.

“Frickin’ hell, I’ve never driven the car in the wet,” he said on Saturday. “I don’t know which buttons I’m going to switch to tomorrow, so that’s going to be new.

“We’re using Brembos [brakes], which I’ve not used for a long, long time. So I don’t know how the Brembos behave in the wet, or what settings we’re going to have to use with this car.”

Wet conditions are predicted for Albert Park tomorrow, with a 70% chance of midday showers.

“When you qualify eighth you hope for it to be wet, but I’ve only got three laps to learn the car in the wet and then get out [for the race],” he said, referring to the laps to the grid F1 drivers are allowed pre-race. “It’s going to be a shock to the system, but I’m going to be learning on the fly and just giving it everything.”

Hamilton has already made adjustments to his Ferrari steering wheel layout – incorporating button shifts and clutch and gearbox paddle changes that retain familiarity from his long stint at Mercedes.

But the British driver also admitted it had been a “slow process” finding “confidence” in the Ferrari.

“When you have a problem with the car and you come in, normally when you’ve got the experience, you can say, ‘OK this is where I want to go with it’, but I don’t know which tool to use at the moment,” he said. “So I’m heavily relying for the first time on my engineers, and they’ve done a great job.”

In addition to the wet settings, there are several items on the car that Hamilton is yet to explore: “There’s a ton of tools that I’m still popping out like, ‘I’ve never tried that, what does it do?’

“Braking and through-corner balance is a lot different to what I had [at Mercedes]. The mechanical balance shift is much, much different and the high-speed balance, the low-speed balance is quite a shift.”

Despite these challenges, Hamilton saw “improvements every single lap, session on session” throughout the weekend, even though he was consistently behind Leclerc.

“I’ve been down all weekend to Charles, who just had it from the get-go from the minute he went out,” the seven-time world champion said. “He knew what the car does but I was just building up to that through the weekend, and I think I got a lot closer towards it in the end.”