Lewis Hamilton Claims Ferrari “Don’t Need Much” to Fight for the Top Spot

With seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton joining Ferrari’s ranks, the team entered the 2025 season with sky-high expectations. Several experts discussed how great it would be for F1 fans to see the Briton have a fairytale ending with the Italian outfit by winning his record eighth title with them.

However, the way Ferrari‘s 2025 season has begun, fans and experts will definitely need to recalibrate their expectations. The Scuderia kickstarted this year’s campaign by scoring just five points in Australia before their 12-point haul in China, thanks to Hamilton’s brilliant sprint race win.

Unfortunately, that form did not carry on in the Grand Prix in Shanghai, and to further rub salt into their wounds, both Hamilton and Charles Leclerc suffered disqualifications. And while one may consider the Japanese GP result—with Leclerc finishing fourth and Hamilton in seventh—a silver lining to their troubles, Ferrari seem to be way off the front-running pace.

With an average three-tenth gap to McLaren, they are already lacking a ton of performance, and their 76-point deficit in the Constructors’ standings after just three rounds reflects that. Nevertheless, Hamilton is still optimistic as he feels there is more in the tank of the SF-25, which can help them bridge that gap to fight at the front.

“We don’t need much to be fighting at the front,” the 40-year-old said during his interview ahead of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix. “With four teams more or less on the same level, every small gain counts. As always, we’ll work as one team, pulling together all the data and pushing in the right direction. I can’t wait to get in the car”.

With 2025 being the last year of the current regulations, the gap among the teams seems to have reduced significantly, and as Hamilton said, “every small gain” will count. In order to get these new gains, Hamilton added that Ferrari will be bringing their first set of upgrades this season, which reportedly includes a new floor.

“We got an upgrade this weekend, so I’m excited, we’re gonna, hopefully, have a bit more downforce,” Hamilton added. “I’m not really feeling huge amounts of issues, it’s just that we lack overall performance, pace-wise, which we’ll hopefully take a step this weekend”.

But considering that other teams will also bring in upgrades, can Ferrari really get to McLaren’s level? Ferrari’s camp definitely thinks so as F1 journalist Giuliano Duchessa reported that the most recent simulations showed that the Italian outfit are “just one tenth behind McLaren, if everything had worked”.

With Ferrari being the closest team to McLaren during pre-season testing in Bahrain, they will definitely hope to put in their best performance of the campaign so far, returning to Sakhir. The journalist adds that all is not lost yet for Ferrari as “last year’s (race in) Monza taught that a championship can be turned around”.

The race in Monza last season was indeed the turning point for Ferrari, as that is when they established themselves as true championship contenders. With Leclerc winning the race and Carlos Sainz finishing fourth, the Italian outfit grabbed 37 points that weekend—their third-best points haul up until that point of the season.

With Leclerc and Sainz registering another win each in Austin and Mexico, respectively, they took the Constructors’ title fight to the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi. Ultimately, they lost out on the championship by just 14 points to McLaren, who won their first title since 1998. Only time will tell if they can emulate that feat in 2025 and take the final step.