Sebastian Vettel defends Lewis Hamilton’s adaptation at Ferrari: “He’s working very hard”

Four-time F1 world champion Sebastian Vettel has backed Lewis Hamilton to adapt to life at Ferrari, conceding it will take “a little bit of time”.

After months of pre-season hype, Ferrari’s 2025 season hasn’t delivered on track.

Neither Hamilton nor Charles Leclerc have finished on the podium in the opening four races of the 2025 season.

Hamilton has trailed Leclerc in three of the opening four weekends, only looking like the quicker of the two Ferraris in China.

Even then, Leclerc finished ahead of Hamilton despite nursing front wing damage before their double disqualification.

After finishing fifth in Bahrain, Hamilton spoke at length about the lengthy adaptation process and how different it is driving for Ferrari after being with Mercedes for so long.

Reflecting on his former rival’s opening four races with Ferrari, Vettel defended Hamilton’s slow adaptation process.

“I think it’s obviously a big step,” Vettel said. “It’s a big shift in culture and I think right now, obviously, it’s very focused on the racing side and on the car and how the car wants to be driven and how it feels and so on.

“But I think adaptation is not only driving. I think it’s also a lot of the things that happen around the driving whilst you’re driving as well.

“So, I don’t know, to give you examples, the steering wheel, for sure, he’s adapted it to the way he likes it, but it’s not the one he had. These things just take time to really adapt and it takes capacity of your brain, which you had sort of available to you in the past because everything was sort of automatic. So it naturally takes a little bit of time.”

Hamilton “not the most successful driver by chance”

Hamilton’s main weakness continues to be qualifying.

Last weekend in Bahrain was a carbon copy of his final year in Mercedes, where he was outqualified by George Russell and then finished right behind him in the race following a strong race performance.

Vettel believes Hamilton is “working hard” to get on top of things with his new team and that it’s just a matter of time before results improve.

“Of course, I know that he has very high ambitions and very high expectations,” Vettel added.

“So at the minute, I know that he’s probably not happy with himself, with how competitive he is. So that works, it sort of works on your mind and he’s obviously not the most successful driver by chance, but for many reasons.

“And he’s working, I believe, very hard to fix all those things and to get back the full capacity that he needs and requires on his driving to race to a level that he’s happy with.”