How Hamilton switched to a “different approach” for F1 Canadian GP

Lewis Hamilton has tweaked his preparation for the Canadian Grand Prix, having struggled of late in Formula 1.

Aside from a successful weekend at Shanghai, Hamilton has underperformed relative to Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc so far in 2026, including last time out in Miami.

The Briton was 0.379s slower in sprint qualifying, then 0.176s down in the main session; he was 24 seconds away from Leclerc in the grand prix before the Monegasque spun, hit the wall and landed a penalty for corner-cutting – all of which occurred on the final lap.

As it happens, the Chinese Grand Prix was the only one Hamilton didn’t prepare for on the simulator; he said he would revert to this approach ahead of Canada as he felt the tool, instead of being helpful, was steering his car away from the ideal set-up, because of its correlation (or lack thereof) with track performance.

Hamilton described the SF-26’s behaviour on the Floridan track – especially early in the weekend – as “not very snappy into corners” and suffering from “massive understeer in mid-corner”, hence a shift being required.

“I’m going to have a different approach in the next race, because the way we’re preparing at the moment is not helping,” Hamilton, who’s lying fifth in the drivers’ championship, said following the Miami round.

“We go on [the simulator] and then it gets to the track and the car feels different when it gets to the track.”

Asked to expand on how he wasn’t ‘preparing properly’, the seven-time world champion explained: “What I mean by it is that I spend time on the simulator. I don’t like simulators in general. I was in the simulator every week on the build-up to this race, working on correlation constantly. You go on it, you prepare for the track, you drive it and you get the car set up to a certain place, and then you come to the track and that set-up doesn’t work.

“On the sprint weekend, for example, you’ve only got Practice 1. You don’t really want to veer off from your set-up too far, like with a big suspension change. So you stay with it and then you make a change going into qualifying and you’ve only got six laps to get on top of it.

“So in an ideal world I should have started where Charles was at the beginning of the weekend, and I think we would have just had a stronger weekend from there.

“So, I’m not going to go on the simulator right now on the next race. I’ll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff. I’m just going to back away from it for a little bit and see. When we went to China I had the best weekend without sim.”

Hamilton did clarify that he was happy with the SF-26 besides the set-up problem, with this year’s smaller, nimbler cars suiting his preference better.

Regardless, Hamilton expects the Canadian GP to be another tricky race for Ferrari, due to the successive 600m, 550m, 1.2km and 650m straights, with the Scuderia down on power relative to Mercedes.

“We’re losing three to four tenths just on straightline speed, so that’s there and it’s going to be there until we fix it,” Hamilton pointed out. “We need to see if we can cut some drag before the next race.”

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– The Autosport.com Team