Racing
© Eterna
Lewis Hamilton said he will not use Ferrari’s simulator before the Canadian Grand Prix after concluding that its virtual preparation did not match the real behaviour of the SF-26 and sent his Miami weekend down the wrong path.
After a difficult Miami, Hamilton said Ferrari’s current preparation method was “not helping” and traced the problem to correlation between the simulator and the track. He said he had been in the simulator every week before Miami, trying to work through the car’s behaviour, only to arrive at the circuit and find the setup he had prepared did not work in reality.
“If I’m honest, I think the simulator really sends me the wrong direction, so I think I might cut that out for now and give it a run without,” Hamilton said after qualifying. He later expanded on the issue, saying: “Ultimately, it’s always correlation. We go on it, and then get to the track, and the car feels different when you get to a track.”
That mismatch mattered more in Miami because of the sprint format. With only one practice session, Hamilton said there was little room to move away from the original setup direction, especially with larger changes such as suspension adjustments. By the time Ferrari tried to correct things before qualifying, he said, “you’ve only got six laps to get on top of it.”
Hamilton believed the weekend would have looked different if he had started from Charles Leclerc’s baseline. “In an ideal world I should have started where Charles was at the beginning of the weekend and I think we would have just had a stronger weekend from there on,” he said.
The decision for Canada is now to strip that element out of his preparation. Hamilton said he will still take part in Ferrari’s factory meetings, but not drive the simulator in the buildup to Montreal. “I’m not going to go on the simulator between now and the next race,” he said. “I’ll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff, but I’m just going to back away from it for a little bit and see.”
He pointed to China as the reason for trying that approach again. Hamilton described Shanghai as his best weekend of the season and said it came without simulator work because there had not been time to return to Maranello after Australia. “When we went to China, I had the best weekend, and without sim,” he said.
The move comes at a time when Leclerc has become Ferrari’s clearer reference point. In Miami, Leclerc had the upper hand through the weekend, and Hamilton only moved ahead in the final classification because of his team-mate’s post-race penalty. That left Hamilton’s simulator criticism carrying more weight, because it was not just one bad session but part of a broader struggle to find a direction that closes the gap inside Ferrari.
Hamilton said the wrong starting point showed up clearly in the car balance. He described the SF-26 in Miami as “very snappy on the way into corners” and suffering “massive understeer mid-corner,” which left him convinced that the setup path chosen before the weekend had hurt more than it helped.
For Ferrari, that makes Canada more than a routine reset. Hamilton is changing a core part of his preparation in the hope that stepping away from one of Formula 1’s central development tools will help him recover a clearer feel for the car and stop Leclerc from pulling further ahead.