Hamilton says he’s playing catch-up with 2025 tyres after testing disruptions

Lewis Hamilton began the season still learning how to get the best from Pirelli’s 2025-specification tyres because of disruptions to his pre-season testing programme.

The Ferrari driver said his victory in the 19-lap sprint event at the second round of the season in Shanghai was the first time he had completed a typical race stint on the new compounds.

“I was reflecting after the last two races, I didn’t get to do the Abu Dhabi test because I was obviously still with Mercedes,” he told the official F1 channel. “All the other drivers got to test the 2025 tyres.

“Then when I came to do my Bahrain test and do my long run I didn’t even get to it because [the car] broke down. So my first long run in the dry, 20 laps, was actually the sprint race, [and] I’m quite happy with how I treated those tyres.”

Following that success, Ferrari’s pace in the grand prix proved a disappointment. “The next day we made some changes to the car and it wasn’t the right direction and made it difficult through qualifying and then particularly in the race,” Hamilton explained. “But there’s lots and lots of learnings to take from those two weeks and I feel that’s really helped prepare us better for moving forwards.”

Although Hamilton also conducted running in Ferrari’s earlier cars before the season began, he lacked experience in wet conditions prior to the first round in Melbourne. “I’ve just been highlighting to the guys that my first time driving in the rain was the first race on the Sunday,” he added.

He said managing the tyre temperatures will be especially critical over a lap of Suzuka this weekend. “Getting the tyres in the window can be a challenge,” he said.

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“I think having them in sync – so you can have the rears in the window and the fronts not in the window or you can have the fronts not in the window – you want to enter the first corner with the rears slightly below and then through the corner they can come up.

“If you start with too hot temperatures then [the] third sector often is an issue. Start too cold, you have instabilities and lose too much in sector one. You might gain some back in the next two, but trying to find the balance between that is a real challenge.”

Following his mixed results over the opening rounds, Hamilton said he “doesn’t know what to expect in terms of how the car will feel necessarily,” at Suzuka.

“But I feel positive. Obviously I’ve got two races behind me now and experienced the tyres, for example the C2 tyre that we had in the last race I hadn’t actually driven that before, so I finally got a race with that under my belt.”

The team’s problems were compounded in China when Hamilton and team mate Charles Leclerc were disqualified as their cars failed technical inspections. Hamilton said he’s confident the team will avoid a repeat in the future.

“I was at the factory with the team during the week and I’m really impressed with how the team digested and worked through the analysis and figuring out ways of working better, moving forwards,” he said. “[There’s] better processes and just hopefully [we’ll] make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

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