Over the previous 20 years, a number of drivers have arrived at Ferrari as world champions, solely to fail to copy their success for the Prancing Horse. Lewis Hamilton says he’s decided to interrupt that streak.
Since Ferrari final received a drivers’ championship with Kimi Raikkonen in 2007, the group has boasted Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel – plus Raikkonen for a second stint – as world champions who’ve joined after which failed so as to add to their championship tallies. Hamilton mentioned the 2 week break for the reason that final race has allowed him time to hold out a number of conferences with Ferrari personnel, together with delivering paperwork to the group for dialogue and suggestions regarding what he feels he must be profitable.
“The explanation for it’s that I see an enormous quantity of potential inside this group,” mentioned Hamilton, who received his record-equaling seven world championships with McLaren and Mercedes.
“The fervour – nothing comes near that. But it surely’s an enormous group, and there are quite a lot of transferring elements. And never all of them are firing on all of the cylinders that they should be.
“That’s finally why the group has not had the success that I believe it deserves. So, I really feel that it’s my job to problem completely each space, to problem everyone within the group — significantly the blokes which are on the prime who’re making the selections.
“Should you have a look at the group over the past 20 years, they’ve had superb drivers: Kimi, Fernando, Sebastian—all world champions. Nonetheless, they didn’t win a world championship [since 2007]. And I refuse for that to be the case with me.
“So, I’m going the additional mile. I’ve been very lucky to have had experiences in two different nice groups. Whereas issues are completely different as a result of there is a completely different tradition and all the things, I believe in case you take the identical path on a regular basis, you get the identical outcomes. So I’m simply difficult sure issues.
“They’ve been extremely responsive. We’ve been bettering in so many areas – by way of advertising, by way of all the things we’re delivering for sponsors, the way in which the engineers proceed to work. There’s nonetheless quite a lot of enhancements to be made, however they’ve been very responsive. In the end, I’m simply making an attempt to create allies inside the group and get them geed-up – get them pushing.
“I’m right here to win. It’s crunch time. I actually consider within the potential of this group. I actually consider they’ll win a number of world championships transferring ahead. They have already got an incredible legacy. However throughout my time, that’s my sole purpose.”
Ferrari arrives on the Belgian Grand Prix with a brand new rear suspension that ran throughout a filming day at Mugello final week, and whereas Hamilton says little could possibly be realized in that state of affairs, he believes the Dash format might additionally delay the group absolutely understanding the extent of the good points.
“We’ll get to check the suspension tomorrow, and I’m positive there’s going to be learnings from it,” he mentioned. “We’ll work out how you can fine-tune it and attempt to extract efficiency from it. On the simulator, there is not any distinction. However I am positive throughout completely different circuits, maybe there will be advantages.
“For me, the constructive factor is arriving on the filming day the place you see that new bits are coming. You see that we’re getting improvement. As a result of typically, we had an upgraded flooring in Bahrain. Then it was fairly a while earlier than we bought one other improve – I believe it was Austria. And pace-wise, it wasn’t essentially what I assumed we’d have.
“Should you have a look at a few of the different groups, they create small items each single weekend, like Crimson Bull typically do or Mercedes do, for instance. Whereas these are extra like huge chunks alongside the way in which. So I used to be simply actually joyful to see that there clearly is a giant push again on the manufacturing unit. There are quite a lot of adjustments, after which to see the outcomes of these adjustments takes time. So I used to be simply actually grateful to see that we bought new elements. We’ll try to put them to make use of this weekend.
“We don’t have quite a lot of time, so you’ll want to double up. You might want to be sure you get as a lot info from each automobiles. You might want to do the entire session. If it’s moist, then that basically hurts your studying. However when it comes to fine-tuning the automobile, it’s extremely unlikely we’re going to totally optimize it throughout this weekend. It’s going to most likely be one thing we’re optimizing over the subsequent few weekends.”
