Karun Chandhok already ‘alarmed’ by what he’s seeing from Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari in F1 testing

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Lewis Hamilton completed his first meaningful laps in the 2026 Ferrari F1 car on Tuesday. Hamilton was one of only four drivers to feature on day two of the Barcelona Shakedown.

While the times are unofficial, it’s widely believed that Hamilton’s best lap was a 1:32.872 in wet conditions. The seven-time world champion took over in the afternoon after Charles Leclerc debuted the SF-26 in the morning.

More importantly, Hamilton completed 57 laps without incident, aside from a brief trip into the gravel. That put Ferrari’s total for the day at a healthy 123.

Has Lewis Hamilton already won his last F1 race?

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However, Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok is already concerned that Ferrari are putting their driver on the back foot heading into the new season.

Karun Chandhok questions why Lewis Hamilton isn’t working with new Ferrari engineer already

Hamilton is working with Bryan Bozzi, Charles Leclerc’s race engineer, on an interim basis. This comes after Ferrari reassigned his 2025 partner Riccardo Adami.

Chandhok is ‘confused’ by this temporary solution, suggesting that Ferrari are missing a perfect opportunity for Hamilton to ‘build a relationship’ with his new engineer.

He may have to compensate by carrying out a private testing programme in older Ferrari machinery. After Barcelona, there are still six days of public running in Bahrain.

“The other thing that’s ringing alarm bells for me is his engineer situation,” Chandhok said on Sky’s Shakedown recap show. “As far as we understand, Bryan Bozzi was running the car today, including for Lewis.

“That confuses me, if I’m perfectly honest. That relationship between driver and race engineer is so, so important.

“They haven’t created a situation where Lewis is building that relationship over the winter. I would have loved to see him doing simulator days, go and get a TPC car.

“You need to integrate that person into the engineering set up of the race team. The public hear the driver-engineer discussion, but that’s just a microcosm of the bigger conversations happening in that engineering office.

“To me, I’m slightly confused that as we sit here, we’ve already started testing, that bonding and relationship-building hasn’t started, off the back of a season which was not good.”

Ferrari are expected to sign Cedric Grosjean, who used to be one of Oscar Piastri’s engineers, but may have to wait until he has completed his post-McLaren gardening leave.

How Lewis Hamilton’s first 2026 Ferrari lap times compare to Red Bull

Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar set a 1:31.891 on Tuesday afternoon, outpacing Hamilton by almost a second in comparable conditions.

It’s worth emphasising that the fuel loads and run plans could well have been different. Hadjar crashed the Red Bull at the end of the day, while Hamilton enjoyed a smooth start.

As for the dry running, Leclerc’s 1:20.844 was around 1.3 seconds off Max Verstappen’s benchmark (1:19.578), although the same caveats apply.

At the time of writing, the best lap of the test still belongs to Hadjar, who set a 1:18.159 on a dry day one.