Charles Leclerc's major revelation about his driving style as Ferrari teammate Lewis Hamilton continues to struggle

Charles Leclerc feels that Lewis Hamilton's remark about his familiarity helping him is legitimate, even though he has revealed that he's had to make some extreme changes to his driving style to suit the new car. The 2025 F1 season was expected to be a progression from how good the team was last season.

In 2024, Ferrari almost won the Constructors Championship from McLaren in the last race of the season. This season the team has added Lewis Hamilton to the ranks, a 7x world champion with a wealth of experience and a penchant for winning. The first 5 races, however, haven't been that productive.

Lewis Hamilton himself has not been a match in any way for his teammate, Charles Leclerc. At the same time, the car does not appear to have great peaks, something that becomes evident with the results where, if we exclude Leclerc's sole podium and Hamilton's sprint win and pole in China, there are no highlights.

There has, however, been a spotlight on Lewis Hamilton this season at every race, and that spotlight gets brighter with every bad performance. In one of the explanations, Hamilton had said that Leclerc's familiarity with the Ferrari plays a role as well.

Talking to the media, Charles Leclerc addressed that this could possibly be the case, he also talked about how he had to make serious changes in his driving style that he's had to make as well. He told Motorsportweek,

“It’s always very difficult to compare drivers’ feeling, because if you don’t feel at ease, there’s always something that you struggle with more than the other driver, that’s why you can’t go as fast. On my side, this year we’ve gone in quite extreme directions in terms of set-up, in order to extract a bit more out of the car, so I feel like I’m changing quite a lot of my driving style in order to fit the new requirements from this car."

He added,

“However, there might be things that, it’s been seven years that I’ve been with Ferrari, so there are most likely things that are also very natural to me now, after so many years with the team that I don’t realise enough, even though I feel like I’ve been driving quite differently this year, just because this car requires a different setup and a different way of driving.”

Lewis Hamilton's struggles with the ground effect era cars

Lewis Hamilton's struggles with the ground effect era cars have been well documented as the driver continues to struggle at Ferrari. Since 2022, there has been a marked drop in the level of performances that the 7x F1 champion has been used to.

This includes the three years at Mercedes where George Russell was his teammate, and the same holds true now when he's moved to Ferrari and has Charles Leclerc in the other car.

The trend of Hamilton's weekends continues to be the same as the driver had last season at Mercedes, where qualifying has been his biggest issue, and that's where he continues to struggle to get the best from the car.

The next few races would be crucial for the driver as he tries to regain some confidence in the car.