Hamilton’s sim-less approach seems to pay off as he outqualifies Leclerc twice at Canadian GP

Lewis Hamilton has refrained from using Ferrari’ssimulator ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, and this approach seems to be bearing fruit so far.

Hamilton outqualified team-mate Charles Leclerc by 0.084s in the sprint and 0.108s in the main session; he was faster in all six qualifying segments this weekend.

This marks a remarkable improvement given their overall head-to-head since the seven-time world champion joined Ferrari, before this weekend, was 27-9 in Leclerc’s favour – and out of the previous nine times Hamilton prevailed, four occurred in China.

Shanghai happens to be the other 2026 round where the Briton didn’t use the Maranello simulator in his preparation, and the Montreal results seem to be vindicating this approach, with a double top-five result. Hamilton actually reckons he could have done even better.

“It felt great,” he said. “We made some good changes in qualifying. Oh, man, I was hopeful for a better result, but I didn’t get my last lap. The car was feeling like we were improving. I think honestly if I got that last lap I probably could have been third.

Asked in what areas the car was giving him more confidence, Hamilton replied: “It’s brakes, corner entry stability, and just with the set-up that I’ve migrated to, I’m much, much happier with being able to attack the corners.”

Back on Thursday, Hamilton delved into his decision not to use the simulator – a tool that he “barely used” at Mercedes and which hasn’t proved useful enough of late, he explained.

“Firstly, the sim is amazing,” the Ferrari driver insisted. “It’s an amazing space to work in. It’s the best sim I’ve ever seen and best group of people that I’ve known, a large team of people that I get to work with there. So, a day at the sim is actually pretty incredible. It is a very powerful tool and something that as a team we continue to evolve. I think since I’ve been there, I’ve had a lot of input in some of this evolution and they’ve been really respondent and made loads and loads of changes, and we’ve just been improving it.

“With simulation, I feel that the goalpost is always moving. So, I started driving the simulator in 1997, the first simulator, I would say, at McLaren. The cockpit didn’t move but we had force feedback in the steering, and I remember it was at Woking, at McLaren’s old factory. And then when it moved to the first real gen, they let me sometimes use it when I was in GP2.

“And then McLaren, we used it relatively often. Didn’t particularly enjoy it, because they were kind of long days and a lot of laps. There’s a point at which you stop learning when you’re doing so many laps, for me personally.

“And then when I joined Mercedes, they were quite far off with the sim at the time. I didn’t use it in all the championships that we won, barely used the simulator, very rarely. And then in 2020, maybe 2021, I started to use it a little bit more. I think there’s only ever been really one time through all the years that I’ve used the sim in these 20 years that the set-up that I had on the sim was the exact set-up I used in qualifying and qualified pole, and that was Singapore 2012, maybe, something like that. So, then all the other times it’s not quite perfect. But as I said, it is a powerful tool.

The Mercedes simulator in 2020

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“I just think since the last year I used it every week and more often than not I felt you do all the work on the sim, you find a set-up that you’re comfortable with, you get to the track and everything is opposite. So, then you’re undoing the things you’ve learned, some of the ways you’ve approached the corners you have to shift and adjust, set-up that you felt that was good on the simulator is not the same at the track. Sometimes it is, and so it’s kind of hit and miss.

“So, I just decided for this one, I’m just going to sit it out and focus more on the data. So, there was just a lot of deep diving on through-corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approaches, brake balance, optimising the brakes, which have been a problem for me for some time. That’s led to really good integration with my engineers.

“It’s not a tool that… I’m not saying I’m never going to use again. I think it’s something that, for sure, we’ll continue to utilise, particularly on power deployment.

“We’ll see how the weekend goes. But China, for example, I didn’t do the sim for China and it was my best weekend.”

As far as the Canadian Grand Prix is concerned, today’s race is forecast to be impact by rain – which Hamilton, a seven-time Montreal winner albeit always on a dry track, is content with.

“I hope that levels us out to the guys ahead and maybe gives us a bit of a chance to fight with the Mercedes,” he concluded, after Mercedes and McLaren locked out the first two rows of the grid at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording

We want to hear from you!

– The Autosport.com Team