Hamilton explains decision to abandon ‘hit and miss’ simulator work for Canadian GP

Lewis Hamilton believes that his work on the simulator at Ferrari’s Maranello base does not always translate accurately to on-track performance, resulting in the Briton changing his approach when preparing for the Canadian Grand Prix.

Since his strongest result of the season in China, where he secured his first Grand Prix podium with the Scuderia, Hamilton has repeatedly missed out on a spot in the top five and admitted that he felt he was in “no man’s land” last time out in Miami.

The run of frustrating performances left him looking for ways to alter his race preparation and he settled on avoiding the simulator ahead of his return to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, the venue that saw his first Grand Prix victory back in 2007.

Asked why he moved away from simulator work, Hamilton responded: “With simulations, I feel that the goalposts are always moving.

“Last year I used it every week and more often than not, I felt that you do all the work on the sim and you find a set-up that you’re comfortable with, you get to the track and everything’s opposite so you’re undoing the things you’ve learned.

“Some of the ways you approach the corners, you have to shift and adjust. The set-up that you felt was good on the simulator is not the same as the track sometimes. Sometimes it is, so it’s kind of hit and miss.

“I just decided for this one, I was going to sit it out and focus more on the data. There was just a lot of deep diving on through-corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approaches, brake balance, optimising the brakes – which has been a problem for me for some time. That’s led to really good integration with my engineers.”

Both he and his team mate Charles Leclerc have openly shared their dissatisfaction with some of Ferrari’s recent results. Like many of their rivals, they introduced upgrades in Miami in an attempt to close the gap to frontrunners Mercedes, but a lack of pace for Hamilton and a spin, and subsequent penalty, for Leclerc left the team keen to look ahead to Canada.

The Briton was full of praise for his colleagues at Ferrari despite their latest struggles, explaining that his move away from the simulator is not a reflection of the work from those behind the scenes.

“The sim is amazing, it’s an amazing space to work in,” he said. “It’s the best sim I’ve ever seen and the best group of people – there’s a large team of people I get to work with there, so a day at the sim is actually pretty incredible.

“It is a very powerful tool and something that as a team, we continue to evolve. I think since I’ve been there, I’ve had a lot of input in some of its evolution and they’ve been really responsive and made loads of changes.

“It’s not a tool that I’m saying I’m never going to use again. I think it’s something that, for sure, we’ll continue to utilise, particularly on power deployment. What I’ve done for the last six months is you’d go in after the weekend and you’d work on correlation, but then you go to the next track and it’s slightly off sometimes, so we’ll see how the weekend goes. China, for example, I didn’t do the sim and that was my best weekend.”