Frustrated after Miami, Lewis Hamilton questions the usefulness of the Ferrari simulator and considers stepping away from it temporarily.
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Lewis Hamilton left the Miami Grand Prix with mixed feelings, marked by inconsistent performances and a car difficult to exploit in race conditions. The Ferrari driver notably struggled to find a satisfactory balance throughout the weekend, alternating between understeer in mid-corner and instability at the entry of turns.
Starting from seventh place in qualifying for the sprint race, then returning to similar positions in the Grand Prix, the Briton never really managed to get involved in the fight for the front positions.
The Ferrari simulator questioned
At the heart of his analysis, Hamilton pointed to a tool supposedly meant to help development: the Ferrari simulator based in Maranello. According to him, the data obtained before the weekend did not correspond to what he then felt on track.
“It’s always a question of correlation. When you go from the simulator to the track, the car behaves differently” he explains.
The seven-time world champion even expressed some mistrust towards this tool that he has rarely used since the start of his career: “I don’t really like simulators in general. Yet, I spent a lot of time on it before this race to work on the correlation.“
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Hamilton believes that the basic settings should have been different from the start of the weekend. According to him, following a different direction, close to that of his teammate Charles Leclerc, would have allowed Ferrari to be more competitive from the first sessions.
“Ideally, I should have started from the same point as Charles from free practice 1. I think we would have had a better weekend” he admitted.
A radical decision for the future
Faced with these gaps between simulation and reality, the Briton announced he wants to ease off on the use of this tool in the coming weeks. He will favor more direct exchanges with engineers at the factory rather than long virtual sessions.
“I am not going back to the simulator before the next race. I will rather participate in meetings at the factory and step away a bit” he explained, recalling that a weekend without the simulator had already been more positive in the past.
Hamilton thus hopes to find a more reliable working base in order to better exploit the potential of his Ferrari during the next championship rounds.
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