Racing
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Charles Leclerc has dismissed the idea that Lewis Hamilton’s decision to skip Ferrari’s simulator was behind the gap between them at the Canadian Grand Prix, saying the difference in Montreal came down to confidence and feel in the car rather than setup or virtual preparation.
The contrast across Ferrari’s weekend was clear. Hamilton delivered his best grand prix result since joining the team with second place, while Leclerc finished fourth, 34 seconds behind his teammate after struggling for rhythm.
Asked after the race whether Hamilton had found something by not using the simulator, Leclerc rejected that explanation. “There’s none of the performance we are seeing today down to a setup,” the Ferrari driver said in post-race media comments. “A setup is, you can say, there’s a tenth in a setup, but at the end of the day, it’s not that much.”
For Leclerc, the bigger issue was his own inability to lean on the SF-26. “It’s more about my feeling and just the way I drove today,” he said. “Not having the feeling, you don’t push a car to its limits, and I can feel I’m completely off the pace. It’s not like I’m pushing, and then you can say, ‘Okay, the setup is not exactly where you want to be.’ By not having confidence on a day like this, I just didn’t push enough.”
The simulator discussion had grown after Hamilton’s comments following Miami, where he said Ferrari’s virtual tool was “not helping” because the SF-26 “feels different” on track. He then chose not to use the simulator before Canada, and his stronger weekend immediately fueled suggestions that the change in preparation had made the difference.
Hamilton has since indicated that he is unlikely to return to the simulator for race preparation. Speaking ahead of Monaco, the seven-time world champion said he was “probably not” going to use it again in that role because “there are just too many risks.”
Even so, Hamilton did not rule out using it in another way. He said he could still help Ferrari improve the simulator by driving it after race weekends and comparing its behavior with what the real car had done on track, a process aimed at improving correlation rather than shaping his own pre-race setup work.