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Fred Vasseur has taken a whole new approach to help Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari in 2026. It has worked a treat, but initially, it did not sit well with the team.
The seven-time champion struggled immensely in 2025, with Charles Leclerc comprehensively beating him with seven podiums to his teammate’s zero. Hamilton was not comfortable in the car and was calling for extensive changes.
Those arrived in 2026, as Vasseur decided to feed off Hamilton’s feedback more for the SF-26. It has resulted in the 41-year-old having a resurgence, with him winning his first race for Ferrari in Barcelona.
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Fred Vasseur’s ‘radical’ changes for Lewis Hamilton in 2026 upset Ferrari staff
Ferrari adopted a whole new philosophy for 2026, and the Brit was central to it. It was not widely accepted, however, as Hamilton caused ‘ructions’ by asking for Carbon Industrie brake discs instead of the team’s usual Brembo ones.
He would be right with this change as he is far more comfortable in the car and is now beating Leclerc, sitting 41 points behind Kimi Antonelli in the standings. But Ferrari staff were not impressed when the changes, as journalist Mark Hughes notes.
He explained on The Race F1 Podcast: “It’s sometimes portrayed as Lewis Hamilton coming in with this superior knowledge from superior teams and saying, ‘What a mess, this needs sorting, this needs sorting, and this needs sorting.’
“I think it’s more he’s coming in, he’s tried the car, he says, ‘I cannot drive this. This is just hopeless. I can’t drive it in this way. You’ve developed a car completely different from anything that I need to drive.’
“And the impact of that and throughout the whole company and all the different departments and all the different engineering groups will be, ‘If we’re going to give him a car like he says that he needs, it’s a completely different philosophy.
“The whole car, the aerodynamics of the car have been developed around our previous philosophy. We’ve got to buy in. If we’re going to take notice of Lewis, we’ve got to buy in, and it’s a complete radical rethink on everything.’
“And that’s what Fred Vasseur has essentially done. And he has pushed against the grain in quite a few cases. And you can imagine there would be resistance because you’ve got engineers there who were saying, ‘Why are we taking notice of the slower driver? The faster driver says this is good.’
“So yeah, there’d be a natural reluctance there, that it would be Fred’s job to galvanise everybody around what it is that he’s trying to do to give Lewis what it is he’s asking for.”
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Some Ferrari personnel thought Hamilton would not turn up in 2026 after his disastrous 2025 campaign. But the 41-year-old has turned a corner and looks like he is back to his best.
Hamilton was critical in the design of the SF-26, and it is taking him to race wins and puts him in a position to fight for the championship.
All of this was possible as Ferrari finally started to listen to his feedback. It was unnatural, as the team are quite stubborn with their approach, but this new way of thinking has got them in a competitive spot.
Hamilton thanks Vasseur for ‘pulling through’ and making the changes that he had been ‘begging’ for at Ferrari. Now that he has got what he wanted, Ferrari are starting to see the results that the seven-time champion
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