Lewis Hamilton provides detailed explanation for avoiding Ferrari’s F1 simulator

Lewis Hamilton has explained why he avoids the Ferrari Formula 1 simulator, despite describing the facility as “incredible”.

Hamilton is statistically the greatest F1 driver of all time and is one of the most experienced drivers on the current grid, but the latest generation of cars have incredibly different characteristics to anything that has come before, meaning that while experience from previous years still counts for something, its impact is greatly reduced this term.

Time in the simulator to gain current experience should therefore provide an upper hand, but Hamilton, who has never been a fan of simulators, views things differently.

“No, I didn’t use a sim,” said the Ferrari driver. “Firstly, the sim is amazing. It’s an amazing space to work in. It’s the best sim I’ve ever seen and best group of people that I’ve known, a large team of people that I get to work with there. So, a day at the sim is actually pretty incredible.

“It is a very powerful tool and something that as a team we continue to evolve. I think since I’ve been there, I’ve had a lot of input in some of this evolution and they’ve been really respondent and made loads and loads of changes, and we’ve just been improving it.

“With simulation, I feel that the goalpost is always moving. So, I started driving the simulator in 1997, the first simulator, I would say, at McLaren. The cockpit didn’t move but we had force feedback in the steering, and I remember it was at Woking, at McLaren’s old factory. And then when it moved to the first real gen, they let me sometimes use it when I was in GP2.

“And then McLaren, we used it relatively often. Didn’t particularly enjoy it, because they were kind of long days and a lot of laps. There’s a point at which you stop learning when you’re doing so many laps, for me personally.”

When Hamilton joined Mercedes, things didn’t change a lot, with the Briton describing the team’s simulator from 2013 “quite far off”, meaning he “very rarely” used the facility during his title-winning years.

He added: “Then, in 2020, maybe 2021, I started to use it a little bit more. I think there’s only ever been really one time through all the years that I’ve used the sim in these 20 years that the set-up that I had on the sim was the exact set-up I used in qualifying and qualified pole, and that was Singapore 2012, maybe, I think, something like that.

“So, then all the other times it’s not quite perfect. But as I said, it is a powerful tool.”

Switching teams for the second time in his F1 career in 2025 after a few challenging seasons in the ground effect cars which he struggled to get to grips with, Hamilton changed his tack.

But even this strategy came with its difficulties, with the correlation between track and simulator rarely lining up.

“I just think since the last year I used it every week and more often than not I felt you do all the work on the sim, and you get to the track, you find a set-up that you’re comfortable with, you get to the track and everything is opposite,” he said.

“So, then you’re undoing the things you’ve learned, some of the ways you’ve approached the corners you have to shift and adjust, set-up that you felt that was good on the simulator is not the same at the track.

“Sometimes it is, and so it’s kind of hit and miss. So, I just decided for this one, I’m just going to sit it out and focus more on the data. So, there was just a lot of deep diving on through-corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approaches, brake balance, optimising the brakes, which have been a problem for me for some time.

“That’s led to really good integration with my engineers.

“It’s not a tool that… I’m not saying I’m never going to use again. I think it’s something that, for sure, we’ll continue to utilise, particularly on power deployment.

“But yeah, so most often what I’ve done for the last six months, you’d go in after the weekend and you’d work on correlation, and so that when we run it again, but then you go to the next track and it’s slightly off sometimes.

“So, we’ll see how the weekend goes. But China, for example, I didn’t do the sim for China and it was my best weekend.”