Lewis Hamilton Reveals The Steep Learning Curve At Ferrari As F1 Testing Continues

Saajan Jogia | Feb 28, 2025

Scuderia Ferrari - Lewis Hamilton / Scuderia Ferrari

As Lewis Hamilton settles into Ferrari following his January onboarding, he has described the steep learning curve of adapting to the team's unique terminology after being accustomed to the technical language used by his former team Mercedes for the past twelve years.

The seven-time world champion has been accustomed to working in a certain rhythm with the Brackley outfit, and the Ferrari switch marks a big reset for him in many ways. While Hamilton is living his dream of driving for a legendary team like Ferrari, he seems to have a lot more to learn than just driving fast in pursuit of his eighth championship title.

As a result, the Briton is currently focused on adapting to the team and the SF-25 F1 car, with his first impression from Bahrain's pre-season testing suggesting a positive start. Hamilton explained that the second day of testing was dedicated to exploring the communication he will have with his race engineer, Riccardo Adami, which will be key to implementing strategies on race weekends. Reflecting on his journey so far and how he has been integrating with the new team, the 40-year-old driver said:

“I am really enjoying the car. We’re slowly bonding.

“Yesterday was a so-so day, just OK. But we got through all our run-plan. We’re testing a bunch of things, so I’m not doing set-up changes or directing where I want the car to go.

“We’re just getting through the motions. Today was a bit more of getting to explore a bit of my interaction with my engineer.

“But so far I really enjoy driving this car.”

Hamilton then outlined the small differences he needs to adjust to in order to communicate quickly and effectively with his Ferrari team members. He added:

“The effect is slightly different and the names they have are different, but ‘roll’ is still ‘roll’ and ‘anti-roll bar’ is still ‘anti-roll bar’.

"Some of the other parts of the geometry, there are different words for it. So I’ve got it on my computer and I’m studying it each day and night to make sure I understand when they talk about these different components.”

Hamilton acknowledges the need to adapt quickly, having been conditioned in a certain way by his racing past with Mercedes. But his enthusiasm to learn everything new seems to be helping him the most. He added:

“I’ve done 12 years in another place where we talked about the same thing all the time. So I was used to it, I knew exactly what they are meaning.

“But every time [Ferrari] mention [something] in a debrief I’m like: ‘What part is this? Okay, it’s this part.’ It’s part of the learning process and that’s what makes it exciting, because it’s all new.

“I’m loving that newness.”