ZANDVOORT, Netherlands — Lewis Hamilton hopes to rediscover his love of Formula 1 in the second half of the season after admitting his enjoyment for the sport was diminished before the summer break by the pressure of driving for Ferrari.
The seven-time world champion joined Ferrari from Mercedes over the winter, fulfilling his boyhood dream of driving for the Italian team.
However, Ferrari’s struggle for performance relative to championship leaders McLaren and Hamilton’s own issues adapting to a completely new car led to a series of disappointing results.
At the last round in Hungary, Hamilton said he was “just useless” after qualifying outside the top ten and suggested Ferrari would be better off replacing him.
Speaking ahead of the resumption of the season this weekend in the Netherlands, the Ferrari driver said his approach to the final ten races of 2025 would be to enjoy the experience of being a Ferrari driver.
“I feel determined to and motivated to [move forward],” he said. “We are just going to be working, keep our heads down, try to change a few things in our approach and start to enjoy ourselves.
“There’s been so much pressure in this first half of the season, it’s not been the most enjoyable. So I think just remembering that we love what we do, we’re all in this together and yeah, trying to have fun.”
Asked where he felt the pressure was coming from, Hamilton added: “Just to get on top of everything, the amount of work we have, all the new partners, the amount of shoots we’ve done, getting integrated into a new team, and it’s a big, big team, the biggest brand in our sport as well.
“So a combination of all those different things has been a lot.”
After coming close to winning the constructors’ title last year, expectations around Ferrari were high ahead of the season.
The arrival of the most successful driver in the sport’s history only served to draw more attention to the team, and Hamilton said the combination had created a level of unwanted “noise” around the team.
“It’s probably the most important part [to have fun], because that’s the reason I got into this sport, it was fun for me, and I think for anyone in whatever career you’re in, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, then why are you doing it? There can often be so much noise, you can lose sight of what’s really, really important.
“I just really want to focus on getting back to that enjoyment. I’ve joined the team that I’ve always dreamed of driving for and there’s been so much noise around that it’s kind of clouded us from getting to enjoy it, so now it’s about moving those things aside and just getting back to focusing on the pure love of what we do.”
Hamilton is not expecting a sudden turnaround in results in the second half of the year, but said F1’s summer break over the past three weeks had been a chance to reset ahead of this weekend’s race at Zandvoort.
“Not much has changed, necessarily, but the good thing is, when you get time to unplug like that, it’s a reset. I had time to go through this past week, particularly, to go through where we’ve been, things we want to improve on, processes, things we want to try and change moving forwards.
“I see a lot of potential. There’s a lot of positives to take from the first [half of the year] even though it didn’t look necessarily the most positive. There’s lots of positives to take from it, which we’ll take forward and try and build on that.”
