Racing
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Lewis Hamilton’s decision to skip Ferrari’s simulator before the Canadian Grand Prix came under fresh scrutiny after he delivered his strongest result yet for the team, finishing second in Montreal after passing Max Verstappen late in the race.
Hamilton had already signaled before the weekend that he wanted a different approach. “With simulations, I feel that the goalposts are always moving,” he said ahead of Montreal. “I just decided for this one, I was going to sit it out and focus more on the data.” He said that meant a deeper look at through-corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approach, brake balance and brake optimization, work he said “led to really good integration with my engineers.”
After the race, Hamilton made the link even more directly. Speaking to media including RacingNews365, he said he would still be open to using the simulator to check correlation after a weekend, but not as part of his normal race build-up. “There are just too many risks. If you look at the two best races I’ve had, I didn’t use a simulator, and that’s honestly how it was,” he said.
That immediately turned attention onto Ferrari’s simulator tools at Maranello. On the Sky Sports F1 Show, Sky Sports Formula 1 lead commentator David Croft said Hamilton’s choice was “quite damning” for the team. “It is quite damning, I think, on the Ferrari simulator that he decides he's not going to use it and then has his best weekend as a Ferrari driver,” Croft said. He added that he would worry about “correlation issues” if the set-up Hamilton gets from simulator work is “often the wrong one.”
Hamilton’s result also appeared to reflect a growing comfort on his side of the garage. In his post-race comments, he called Montreal “the happiest day of my Ferrari days so far” and said: “I finally have the engineering team that I've been working towards.” He added that he could now understand the car better, felt far more comfortable with it and was “mentally in a good place.”
The contrast with Charles Leclerc sharpened the significance of the weekend inside Ferrari. While Hamilton left Canada upbeat, Leclerc described it as “one of, if not the, worst weekend of my career.” He said he had work to do “to get to Lewis’s level on a day like this” after struggling badly in conditions that left him unable to get the tires into their performance window.
That is also the main reason for caution before declaring a complete reset in Ferrari’s internal order. Montreal and Shanghai are both circuits where Hamilton has historically been especially strong, and Canada came as Leclerc endured what he himself called a career-worst weekend. That makes the comparison less definitive than the finishing order alone suggests.
Even so, Montreal looked like a meaningful shift in momentum. Hamilton not only secured his best Ferrari finish so far, but did it after rejecting a preparation tool he no longer fully trusts and after building a closer working rhythm with his engineers. With Leclerc admitting how far off the pace he had been, Ferrari now heads to the next run of races with Hamilton’s side of the garage carrying new weight in the team’s fight for performance.