Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur admits he underestimated the challenges Lewis Hamilton faced in his first season with the team, but believes small details will make a big difference in 2026.
Hamilton joined Ferrari from Mercedes at the start of the year, but the dream of fighting for victories with the Italian team quickly turned into what the seven-time champion described as a “nightmare.”
For the first time in his 19-year career, Hamilton went a full season without scoring a podium and was outqualified 19 times to five by his teammate Charles Leclerc.
Vasseur stressed that Hamilton often missed out by relatively small margins to Leclerc, but admitted the challenge faced by Hamilton was bigger than he first anticipated.
“I think it was difficult for Lewis, and it’s too small a word probably, but it was difficult because after 20 years — I say 20 years because for me McLaren was McLaren-Mercedes and then Mercedes — he spent 20 years with Mercedes, it was a huge change,” Vasseur said.
“I personally underestimated the step. It’s not that we are doing worse or better, it’s that we are just doing differently.
“It’s not just about the food or the weather, it’s that every single software is different, every single component is different, the people around him, they were different, and if you are not on the top of everything, you leave on the table a couple of hundredths of seconds, and today with the field that we have, I think it was in Abu Dhabi in Q2 that you had one tenth covering P5 and P15.
“We were not in full control of every single detail and package, and we lost a bit of the path of the season like this.”
Vasseur said improvements needed to be made across the board — both from the team and driver — in order for Hamilton to realise his full potential in 2026.
“I think it has to come from everywhere,” he added. “I think that the mindset of the team and the mindset of the driver has to be that let’s try to do a better job everywhere.
“It’s not that you have something which is going well and the rest is going wrong. At the end of the day, we have to improve. We have to improve into the collaboration with Lewis. We have to improve on the team. He has to improve perhaps on how he gets the best from the car that he has.
“It’s not that when you are three tenths behind someone, it’s not that they have the magic bullet or they have the component in the car with three tenths faster. Quite often, it’s that you have 10 topics where you are three hundredths of a second slower. One after one, we have to tackle each point.”
Vasseur also believes improvements will come from Hamilton and Ferrari gaining a better understanding of each other over time — an advantage Leclerc has built up over seven years with the team.
“Honestly, it’s also a matter of mindset, a matter of understanding each other,” he added. “I’m speaking about one side of the garage.
“In this case, it’s because with Charles we know each other. But in this case, it’s more to understand exactly what he needs, what he wants. And for him, the same for me, to understand exactly what he would like to do.”
