Hamilton has no time for haters as Ferrari F1 struggles linger on

Lewis Hamilton has no time for anyone questioning his ability as he admits it could take months for him to fully get to grips with his Ferrari Formula 1 car.

Despite winning the sprint race at the Chinese Grand Prix, it has proved a tough start to life at Maranello for the seven-time world champion.

Cutting a forlorn figure in the post-race media pen in Saudi Arabia a fortnight ago, he conceded the ground effect era was his worst since he first entered F1 with McLaren in 2007.

Radio spats with race engineer Riccardo Adami, struggling to match the pace of team-mate Charles Leclerc and disqualification from the grand prix in Shanghai has seen Hamilton’s F1 future called into question in some quarters.

“I forget about it straight away, I just don’t really think about it,” he said in Miami GP, when asked by Autosport about how he deals with critics.

“I try not to really focus on opinions of people that give no insight into what is actually going on, insights from individuals that have never been in my position.

“So yeah, I just kind of keep my head down and try to continue to enjoy the work that I do with the people that I work with.”

That work continues in Florida this weekend at the Miami Grand Prix but, with no upgrades on the Ferrari, Hamilton was not particularly upbeat about the chances of improvement – likening his start to 2025 to when he first switched to Mercedes in 2013.

“No clue,” he said when asked about what could be expected of the driver and team in Miami.

“We’ll do the best we can, we’ve not got upgrades or anything this weekend, but we continue to try and optimise the car and obviously Charles in the last race did a fantastic job and showed what the car can do in a race, so the goal is to try to replicate that.

“We went through a lot (since Jeddah). There’s some good sim running and there are things that we’ve made adjustments, and we will see how they work this weekend.

“When I joined Mercedes the first six months was tough, getting attuned to working with new people, obviously the engineers that I’m working with now are used to setting up a car for a different driver and a different driving style and I’m used to driving a car with a different driving style and so it’s just a combination of a bunch of different things

But the worry for Ferrari and Hamilton fans came when he admitted he could not rule out needing a similar period of adjustment this time round: “I really don’t know (if it will take as long with Ferrari), we’re working as hard as we can to shorten that but it could be longer, who knows?”