Ferrari insider spills the beans on Lewis Hamilton’s impact in team briefings

Lewis Hamilton’s influence on Ferrari team briefings has been explained by an insider.

Lewis Hamilton’s start to his Ferrari chapter has been less than ideal, with a sprint race win in China and a P5 in the F1 Bahrain Grand Prix the highlights.

A series of increasingly downbeat interviews have crept in recently, mirroring his despondency from the past two years at Mercedes.

But behind-the-scenes he is positively impacting his new environment, claims Marc Gene, a former Ferrari test driver and now an ambassador.

Lewis Hamilton telemetry data hailed by Ferrari ally

“It's very early days with Lewis,” Gene told the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“He won the Sprint in China, which was amazing. I'm just getting to know him, but no one can doubt his talent.

“He's very experienced and you can really see he knows what he needs.

"That's why, from Melbourne to China, he made a huge improvement because coming from another team, it really is not easy. With the current Formula 1 that you cannot test, it's so hard to change teams and to get used to the dynamics, to get used to the steering wheel. That takes time.

"But already in the briefings, when he talks, you can really tell that he's really giving some very important information and then he's very exceptional in tyre management.

“I look at the telemetry and you see some things that he's very exceptional.

“I know people say he won so much because he had the best team. Now that I've seen him, there's a reason why he won so much.”

Hamilton has become bluntly honest about his own shortcomings at the past couple of F1 rounds.

He bemoaned “every Saturday” for his poor qualifying performances, then after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix he insisted that he couldn’t place any blame on the SF-25 for his P7 result.

Ferrari have seen superstar drivers fail before, and will hope Hamilton can turn around his sub-par start.

"There's a lot of pressure at Ferrari,” Gene insisted.

“There's no other team in the world that you have to cope with so much pressure, but as a driver, he's going to experience things that he never experienced before, probably his debut in Fiorano, to see so many people that they had to close the roads. This at the end of the day is nice.

"He has a very good team around him, but I don't think it's difficult for him.

“We are making sure that he adapts to the Ferrari world very fast. We are very proud at Ferrari that he chose not to retire from Formula 1 without living his dream of being part of the Ferrari family.

“I think that's part of Ferrari’s DNA. Everybody dreams one day of driving a Ferrari."