Lewis Hamilton makes stunning admission about 2025 season

Sam Cook Monday 2 February 2026 21:02

Lewis Hamilton and Riccardo Adami in conversation

Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton has spoken highly of Ferrari's positive start to pre-season testing this year, while making a startling admission about the team's 2025 testing schedule.

Hamilton joined Ferrari last year, and there was a lot of hype surrounding the move in the precursors to the 2025 season.

However, Hamilton did not manage to claim a single grand prix podium in 2025, and even struggled to match his team-mate, finishing 86 points behind Charles Leclerc in the drivers' championship.

He is hoping that 2026 will be different, with wholesale new regulation changes sweeping into the sport which may allow Ferrari to challenge more closely with the likes of Mercedes and McLaren.

And as the F1 world scrambled last week to try and find out any clues about how each team may be shaping up at the first pre-season testing event of the year in Barcelona, Ferrari showcased brilliant reliability, completing over 400 laps across their three allocated days at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Following Friday's testing, Hamilton cut a positive figure, explaining that early impressions of the new SF-26 had been good, while also making a stunning admission about the start of his 2025 season.

"Honestly, it's been a really enjoyable week," Hamilton told F1TV, before going on to talk about the differences between last year's pre-season testing with Ferrari and this year's shakedown.

"Last year I went to the first race and it was on the Sunday of the actual race was the first time I had driven the Ferrari and that was a very hard race.

"So it’s good to have that experience and get that knowledge."

How much can we read into the F1 Barcelona shakedown?

In truth, not too much. With F1 doing everything that they could in order to try and keep the test private, not even 'official' lap times were released.

Even the ones that were confirmed by teams to be true won't be too representative given the early stage of testing that we are at.

There are still six days of testing remaining in the pre-season, before we then head to Australia for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix at the beginning of March.

However, what we did learn from the Barcelona shakedown is that all of the F1 teams seem to have remarkably good reliability given they only fired up their new power units for the first time proper last week.

Ferrari is certainly in that category. They managed to put in over 400 laps, while customer team Haas completed some mammoth stints with a Ferrari power unit.

Time will tell as to whether this reliability will also result in a car capable of challenging for world championships, however, with Ferrari and Hamilton under pressure to compete for race victories in 2026.

F1 Lewis Hamilton Ferrari