I went through all of Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari radio messages and noticed that he kept asking one question

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Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari were without doubt the biggest disappointments of the 2025 F1 season relative to winter expectations. No driver transfer in the sport’s history had ever generated so much buzz.

Hamilton failed to score a single podium, having managed at least five in each of his first 17 seasons. While Charles Leclerc didn’t win a race on the other side of the garage, he did bring home seven trophies.

2025 cemented the theory that Hamilton’s driving style simply doesn’t mesh with the ground-effect cars. There’s also a growing school of thought that his powers are waning at the age of 40.

But Hamilton and his engineers were also hampered by poor execution. Even with the limitations of the car and the driver, there were many more points on the table.

Hamilton’s radio communications with new race engineer Riccardo Adami have come under heavy scrutiny ever since the first race of the season. I went through all of them to see if I could spot any trends.

Lewis Hamilton’s most common radio message: ‘Where’s all that time?’

I found that, on at least 21 separate occasions over the course of the year, Hamilton asked Adami the following question, or a slight variant: “Where is all that time?”

Part of an engineer’s job is to inform a driver about where they’re losing out relative to their rivals. The problem here is that Hamilton should already have an inkling of which corners he failed to optimise.

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Instead, the seven-time world champion often sounded genuinely dismayed by the large gap to Leclerc or the dominant McLaren cars.

If a driver knows why they’re slow, then it’s easier to address the issues involved. But the lap times seemed to come as a surprise to Hamilton.

He was left trying to replicate his teammate’s driving techniques rather than putting his own stamp on the SF-25. There was perhaps a fundamental disconnect between the Briton and his machinery.

Lewis Hamilton needs to study how these two rivals speak on the radio

Former F1 driver Robert Doornbos says Hamilton needs to start motivating Ferrari over the radio, just as Max Verstappen does at Red Bull.

Karun Chandhok is concerned about Hamilton’s communication with Adami. He may still be trying to overcome ‘cultural and language differences’ after working with Peter Bonnington since 2013.

Chandhok wants Hamilton to listen to former teammate George Russell, who has set a ‘gold standard’ with Mercedes engineer Marcus Dudley.

The winter break gives Hamilton and Adami a crucial opportunity to review their first season together and make the necessary adjustments to their process.