Ferrari have solved one issue Lewis Hamilton absolutely ‘hated’ with their 2026 F1 car

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Lewis Hamilton is desperate to see changes with the new technical regulations in Formula 1 after a dismal last few years.

Since the start of the ground-effect era, Hamilton has struggled to find performance, with the previous generation of cars not suiting his driving style. Not even a change of scenery from Mercedes to Ferrari helped him.

The seven-time champion had arguably his worst season to date in 2025, failing to register a podium. Now, in 2026, Hamilton is hoping to have a change of fortune with the new regulations.

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It has been suggested that Ferrari will make Hamilton’s 2026 car more ‘predictable’, something that he and Charles Leclerc had been calling for throughout 2025. The pair have taken to the track this week in Barcelona for the first pre-season test.

‘Suspicions’ have already been raised about Ferrari as they have been seen to have an S-Duct on the SF-26. The Maranello outfit have made some aggressive changes ahead of 2026, and it has solved one of Hamilton’s biggest problems.

Lewis Hamilton says he no longer has porpoising with his 2026 Ferrari

Speaking after his first run in the SF-26 in Barcelona to the official F1 website, Hamilton detailed that he no longer had porpoising with the car. It was something he had immensely struggled with in the ground effect era.

“I don’t want to say too much about it just yet, because it’s difficult to know. As I said, I’ve only driven it in the rain,” he said.

“I mean, it’s a lot less downforce than we had last year, but we don’t have the porpoising that we had last year, or at least in 2022 when we started it. So there’s definitely positives.

“And it’s massively challenging for everybody, for every team, which I think is great. It really puts everyone on the back foot. I mean, everyone’s really going to kind of be on their toes and learning as you go.”

This is a huge sign of improvement for Hamilton, as the new regulations, at the early stages at least, seem much more comfortable to him and to Ferrari, who are looking to put last year’s disappointment behind them.

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What Lewis Hamilton and George Russell said about the 2022 Mercedes

Porpoising was a major problem for Hamilton with the previous cars, particularly when they were first introduced in 2022.

Mercedes’ infamous ‘zeropod’ W13 was a car that the Brit openly ‘hated’, mainly due to its underperformance. But porpoising was one of its biggest flaws.

It was so bad that at one point, after the Azerbaijan GP, Hamilton was left with back pain. It was a car that he and teammate George Russell despised.

Talking about the W13 via The Mirror, Hamilton asked Russell: “Have you learned through the year like, [you] hated the car? There were definitely moments when you just hated the damn thing because it wouldn’t do what you wanted it to do and the bouncing around, you just got sick and tired.”

Russell then said: “There was a time when I didn’t even remember what it was like to drive a car that didn’t bounce. I think the first race we did, it might have been Barcelona, we had no bouncing. I was like ‘What is this?”