Evaluating Hamilton's first two Grand Prix weekends with Ferrari

Joining Ferrari for the 2025 season, earlier than expected Hamilton delivered a sensational pole and Sprint Race win in Shanghai, but the rest of the campaign so far has been marked by inconsistency and controversy.

Both Hamilton and teammate Charles Leclerc were disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix due to technical infringements, a blow that followed a challenging outing in Australia.

Villeneuve reflected on Hamilton’s Ferrari debut, noting the early dynamic between driver and team: “Lewis, having won a race, I'm not sure is very good for the relationship! It really puts Lewis in a privileged place within the team. He was already the biggest name, the biggest star, and now he's the one who got a win for Ferrari when all the other races have been awful.”

The 1997 Formula 1 World Champion argued the blame lies more with Ferrari than with Hamilton for the underwhelming start to the season: “He's won a sprint race. He's had a great start. Lewis got a pole in a sprint race and that's actually very good. It’s more than what people were expecting in the first two races.

“His Saturday in China was incredible because it wasn't the best car, it wasn't a winning car, and he was really on it. He maximised the fact that he was on pole and controlled that sprint race.

“From what I heard Ferrari then made some changes for the actual race and it just wasn't as good, but anyway, they got disqualified. It’s more a bad start to a season for Ferrari than it is for Lewis.”

Villeneuve was critical of Ferrari’s strategic decisions across the China weekend, particularly the car set-up changes that contributed to the disqualifications: “It happens. It happened to Mercedes last year with George Russell. One kilo, that’s rough, but that's the rules and they should have taken the tyres into account.

“Nobody had tested the hard tyre. Lewis put on a new set. He did a two-stop, one of the only drivers to do so, and it wasn’t underweight. Then Leclerc kept on driving on the same old tyres and ended up using more rubber than expected.

“I guess from the start they ran too close to the limit. Also, Leclerc lost a piece of the front wing. That's weight. I don't know how much that piece of wing is, and I don't know if they can then add it back on or not.

“They could have thought about it, but that's also why the drivers drive on the dirty part of the track on the slowdown lap to pick up rubber to bring back and put some weight on the car. Maybe they didn't pick up enough rubber on the way down.”

Villeneuve also questioned the extent of the wear on Hamilton’s car: “And then Lewis, with the skid block hitting; the cars spend their whole race hitting the ground, so the fact that the skid block was halved by 0.5 mm, that’s a lot. There’s really something strange with the setup if they manage to eat so much of the skid.

“It's really hard to go through that. It’s really strange. They would have seen it in the sprint race, so the setup change they made for that race was not the best.”

The seven-time F1 World Champion’s radio exchanges have also come under scrutiny since his arrival at Ferrari, but Villeneuve believes such reactions are exaggerated; he explained: “It's been like that for every driver, every year. We only hear some of the radio messages without the context and they do that on purpose obviously because, you know, it's TV ratings.

“I found Lewis to be very calm and polite with his engineer whenever there was an issue: ‘don’t talk now’ or ‘I need this’. He’s been very good, and they need to build a relationship. He had been with the same guy for many years and it's hard to beat that because there's a communication line that at some point is not even the language, in a way. It’s just a level of understanding between each other that is immediate through the strength of the voice, not necessarily the words.”

Villeneuve stressed the added difficulty of the language barrier: “That takes time to build, especially going from an English-speaking engineer who he had been with for many years to an Italian speaker for whom English is his second language. It takes time to build a new relationship.

“Some stuff will be lost in translation along the way. It just takes time to build, and they don’t need people overreacting to the radio messages.”

Villeneuve concluded by drawing a contrast with other drivers’ radio conduct: “I found it amazing. Listening to Verstappen's radio messages over the years, there was nothing in the one from Lewis. There’s no comparison. He was calm, this is how it is, and there was a nice response from the other side. There were no issues there so I'm not sure why people reacted to it.

“When you're the biggest name in the sport, and the biggest team in the sport, it will happen. It's part of the game and you just have to accept it," added Villeneuve.

Heading to the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend, Hamilton will make his 359th Formula 1 start on Sunday. He is a six-time winner at Suzuka, no other driver has won more than twice at the hallowed Japanese Grand Prix venue.