Why Ferrari’s ‘win or nothing’ culture could be hurting Lewis Hamilton

Ferrari starts the F1 2026 season with renewed optimism follow praise for the team’s “winning menality” from Lewis Hamilton after the Barcelona shakedown.

But then again, being positive about Ferrari and its chances of success, is the only message the Italian team would ever entertain, according to Alex Brundle. Even if it costs the team.

That’s how Ferrari was made’

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After last year’s troubles when the hype and expectation of Hamilton’s arrival from Mercedes fell flat, and within weeks of the season beginning, there is renewed enthusiasm for the season ahead.

“Everyone’s really on it,” Hamilton, who often cut a dejected figure last year, declared after going P1 at the Barcelona shakedown. “I really feel the winning mentality, like in every single person in the team, more than ever.

“So it’s a positive. Everyone’s positive and incredibly enthusiastic.”

But as Ferrari‘s Tifosi know all too well, what often starts in optimism ends in disappointment with the team failing to win a Drivers’ Championship since Kimi Raikkonen’s 2007 success.

Brundle says that’s because Ferrari’s ethos, created by founder Enzo Ferrari, will not entertain the thought of failure.

Put to him that the Ferrari and the Tifosi “would never allow” the team to talk down its prospects, he said: “I do think that that is a problem that Ferrari have.

“When you look into the history of Ferrari and how that brand came to be, that win or nothing, we go racing, and we occasionally sell a car if we wake up in the morning and the V8 engine stock is depleted. ‘Yeah, somebody ring a prince and see if he wants a race car’.

“That’s how Ferrari was made. One guy with an extreme, it’s unfair even to call it a passion, like obsession with racing.

“So to acknowledge that they don’t intend to win the Formula 1 World Championship, I don’t think would be in Ferrari vernacular.”

But it wasn’t just the hype and huge weight of expectation that hurt Hamilton and Ferrari last season.

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Breaking down what he believes went wrong, Brundle reckons not only was Hamilton’s driving style not suited to the ground-effect aerodynamic cars, he also had to adapt to Ferrari’s processes.

The Briton may be the most successful driver of all time with seven World titles and 105 grand prix wins, but Ferrari has a way of doing things – the Ferrari way.

“Well, there are a couple of things,” the commentator explained. “There’s an overarching phrase in motorsport, which I believe is Ron Dennis’ originally, which is ‘past performance has no monopoly on future results’.

“So every race you do, you start from scratch, physics, F1 and the world of motorsport owes no one anything. Not to sniff at what anybody, the achievements of any driver in the past, which obviously are written into the history books and are chart-topping in Lewis’s case.

“This particular set of regulations, and also the Ferrari are not hugely to Lewis’s strength. He likes to pick a car up by the scruff of the neck. He likes the rear moving around underneath him. And the particular way the latest before this one twist of regulations happened was, was not to Lewis’s natural inclination and driving style.

“And then above and beyond that, I think there’s a certain inertia in the way that Ferrari do things – their processes, their mentality of setting up a car.

“Which even though there was tremendous respect for Lewis – was that the biggest transfer of a racing driver between two teams of all time, it’s definitely up there – tremendous respect for this coming into Ferrari, this he would still have had to overcome, while being incredibly institutionalised by immense success at Mercedes and the time period at Mercedes, he would have had to overcome a little bit of that inertia.

“All of those little bits together, I think, have amounted to a disadvantage. And any disadvantage then spirals slightly when everybody expects huge results, maybe starts to panic a little bit, even though they’d never admit it, not necessarily even in Lewis’s case, but in the team’s case, that those results aren’t coming.

“Then we all over try slightly, because that’s human nature. And so it goes on.”

This year Formula 1 has scrapped the ground-effect aerodynamic cars for overbody aerodynamics with cars that are shorter, lighter and include movable front and rear wings.

Brundle believes Hamilton could come to the fore to fight for a record-breaking eighth World title.

“He’s got a tremendous opportunity now, if this Ferrari engine is good to resurrect that stim Ferrari, and he is a technical mind in terms of development of a race car and a library in terms of his feel for what a race car needs.

“So he’s got as good a chance as anybody, I think, in this new reg set.”

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