‘Old-school’ Lewis Hamilton agrees with Michael Schumacher about Ferrari’s simulator

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Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari legend Michael Schumacher have expressed similar reservations about the value of the simulator.

After a difficult weekend in Miami, Hamilton said he wasn’t going to use the Ferrari simulator before Canada. He felt it was leading him astray with his set-up decisions.

The 41-year-old then produced arguably his most impressive display as a Ferrari driver in Montreal. He finished second, his best result in red, and outpaced Charles Leclerc in all six qualifying segments (Sprint and Grand Prix).

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Jolyon Palmer reminded of Michael Schumacher with Lewis Hamilton’s simulator concerns

Speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, Jolyon Palmer backed Hamilton’s decision to step away from the simulator. He says the benefits are ‘negligible’, particularly given that the technology is still adjusting to the new regulations.

Hamilton is the second-most experienced driver in F1 history, having hit 385 race starts in Canada. He has complained about the lack of correlation between the Ferrari simulator and the real world.

If anything, he says the previous routine benefited the team more than the driver.

“I would argue no [he doesn’t need it],” said Palmer. “He’s got so much muscle memory of how to drive around circuits. He understands what he wants from the car.

“I think there’s a new age of young driver that lives on the simulator and they do a lot, but the correlation is really difficult. We’ve got new regs, new cars, different ways of driving, different ways of deploying energy around the lap, which is changing lap on lap, day on day.

“Unless the simulator is perfectly correlated to what you’re going to get on the track, it’s a negligible benefit anyway, because you can’t then plug and play on a Friday. You saw how dirty the track was on a Friday, it’s evolving in all sorts of different ways, you’ve got wind direction changes.

“A driver like Lewis, who’s been around nearly 20 years, if he doesn’t feel like there’s value in going on the sim, then the value would probably be more on Ferrari’s side to get his feedback, to improve set-up, correlation to improve the simulator even further.

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“They’ve got development drivers who do a lot of that work. That’s the whole point of development drivers. Charles is still using the simulator, so he’s not on the same page. I think each to their own.”

Palmer also recalled that Schumacher, who saw the introduction of Ferrari’s first modern simulator, was never keen on the system.

“Schumi never liked a sim, did he?” he said. “When he left Ferrari, came back to Mercedes, the world had changed a little bit. It literally made him sick, so he stopped using them.”

What Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton have said about simulators

Schumacher drove the simulator sparingly at both Ferrari and Mercedes, partly because he experienced motion sickness and partly because he didn’t see didn’t feel the need to use it extensively.

“As far as I understand there are some other top teams that have a simulator but make very little use of it,” he said during his time with the Silver Arrows, via Crash.

“For us drivers the main benefit of them would be to get used to a track. But for me personally that has never been an issue. I don’t see the big advantage of them.”

Speaking in the post-race press conference on Sunday, Hamilton pointed out that he didn’t need a simulator to win six world championships at Mercedes. It doesn’t align with his ‘old-school’ approach to racing.

“There are just too many risks,” he explained. “If you look at the two best races I’ve had, I didn’t use a simulator. And that’s honestly how it was.

“Pretty much all the championships before, except for probably 2008, I didn’t use the sim. So it’s not a necessity. It’s a tool that can be powerful. But for me, I’m old school. I’m probably better without it.”