Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has defended Lewis Hamilton for his sluggish begin to life at Ferrari.
After 12 years at Mercedes, Hamilton shocked the sporting world by asserting his swap to Ferrari for the 2025 F1 season.
Nonetheless, the Hamilton-Ferrari partnership hasn’t lived as much as expectations.
Ferrari’s SF-25 has underdelivered on observe.
Even within the fingers of Charles Leclerc, it has solely completed on the rostrum thrice.
Hamilton’s greatest end result got here within the China dash race, profitable from pole place.
Hamilton has spoken overtly about how totally different Ferrari’s F1 challenger is to drive and the way they arrange the automobile is totally totally different to the way it was accomplished at Mercedes.
His former group boss has backed him to show issues round.
“You don’t unlearn driving that shortly,” Wolff advised Bloomberg Scorching Pursuit.
“In 2021, he was nice. Then the rules modified, and it obtained just a little tougher, however he was nonetheless acting at a really excessive stage.
“Simply by altering groups, immediately you don’t lose your abilities. Everyone wants a interval of adaptation. Completely different automobile, totally different DNA in how the car drives and a brand new engineering group that you’ll want to begin working collectively.
“Then you must be concerned within the steady improvement of the automobile so it fits your driving model.
“It’s an all-Italian group, and he’s a British man parachuted in there. And that takes time.
“Additionally, we’ve seen a little bit of a sample that Lewis, initially of the season, wants to search out his mojo and the second half of the season has at all times been very robust.”
Wolff nonetheless “shut associates” with Hamilton
Whereas Wolff was shocked by Hamilton’s choice to go away Mercedes, he insists their private relationship has remained robust.
“You at all times should miss an individual like Lewis Hamilton,” Wolff added. “And as you say, we’re nonetheless shut associates. We’ve given our phrase to one another that we are going to keep shut associates.
“We’re preventing laborious on observe, with the gloves off, as a result of we have to battle for our respective groups – and that’s the type of rule we’ve.
“However off observe, we spend time with one another, we journey collectively, and I don’t wish to miss the pal that I’ve had for therefore a few years.
“It’s the longest driver-team relationship in Formulation 1 – 12 years. You hardly ever see that in another sport.
“And in relation to creating the automobile, clearly he has quite a lot of expertise. He’s seen all of it, and changing somebody like Lewis Hamilton is at all times going to be tough.”
