Sky Sports Formula 1 lead commentator David Croft has described Lewis Hamilton’s recent decision not to use Ferrari’s simulator programme as “quite damning” for the Maranello outfit, raising concerns over the team’s factory-to-track correlation issues.
Following a tricky start to his time with Ferrari, Hamilton finally appears to have turned a corner. The seven-time champion, who joined the Scuderia in 2025, delivered his strongest weekend as a Ferrari driver to date in Canada. He had a tense battle with four-time champion Max Verstappen in the closing laps of the race and eventually overtook the Red Bull driver to take second place.
This came after the Briton confirmed that he had moved away from using the Ferrari simulator. “With simulations, I feel that the goalposts are always moving,” Hamilton told the media before later adding ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix: “I just decided for this one, I was going to sit it out and focus more on the data.
“There was just a lot of deep diving on through-corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approaches, brake balance, optimising the brakes – which has been a problem for me for some time. That’s led to really good integration with my engineers.”
Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
Photo by: Andrej Ivanov / AFP via Getty Images
Speaking alongside presenter Simon Lazenby and former W Series driver Jamie Chadwick on the Sky Sports F1 Show, Croft explained: “It’s great to see Lewis Hamilton happy. Now, whether it’s advisable to stay off the sim for the rest of the season, I don’t know. It is quite damning, I think, on the Ferrari simulator that he decides he’s not going to use it and then has his best weekend as a Ferrari driver.
“So I would worry about the correlation issues if, as he said, the set-up that he’s given after going on the sim is often the wrong one. But at least he’s got the courage of his convictions, as he often has, to try and find a way around it, and I thought he drove superbly in the race. And when he had a sniff of getting at Max, Max was losing temperature in his tyres, he really went for it, and it was brilliant to see.”
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