A former Ferrari team member has revealed what his old colleagues really think about seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton joined Ferrari at the start of 2025, ditching the Mercedes team with whom he’d been so successful with over 12 seasons.
The Brit is the most successful driver in the history of the sport, and at 41 years of age, he is still chasing after a record-breaking eighth world championship title.
However, when he first joined Ferrari, a drivers’ title couldn’t have been further from his thinking.
Hamilton finished down in sixth in the drivers’ championship last year and, perhaps more damaging for his stellar reputation, he finished 86 points behind team-mate Charles Leclerc while driving the same car.
In 2026, Hamilton has turned things around. The 41-year-old is right back on the top of his game, having picked up a grand prix win and four further podiums from the opening 11 race weekends of the season.
He is now Kimi Antonelli’s closest challenger in the drivers’ championship, although the 50-point gapdoes look like a tricky mountain to scale heading into the summer break.
Hamilton’s form has been much better this year – he is 31 points ahead of Leclerc in the standings – and Ferrari have also given him the tools to fight closer to the front more often.
And as things are coming together nicely for Hamilton at Ferrari, former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley has revealed quite how much his former colleagues love having the seven-time champion around.
Hamilton helping Ferrari improve
“Ferrari is consistently fast now, right? They’re always there or thereabouts,” Smedley said on the High Performance podcast. “Sometimes they’ve got the fastest car but if they haven’t they’ve got the second fastest car and that’s been a trend for certainly since Barcelona, even preceding that, but a little bit more inconsistent.
“But it also feels like, and I’m going to give Lewis a shout out on this. It also feels like he pushes the team hard. We’ve talked about this before, when you get a driver of his standing in, the team just feels one per cent more capable.
“You add in like the 2,000 women and men who work at Ferrari, those little like one per cent’s, they all add up.”
When asked if he still speaks to people at Ferrari and whether the vibe there is that they like Hamilton and he is pushing them forward, Smedley said: “Definitely. We’ve talked about it before. I mean, they love him.
“When I talk to the guys one-on-one or all the group chats that I’m in, you know, they all absolutely love him because he’s delivering and he’s a seven-time world champion and they know that he is somebody who can deliver, he can still deliver world championships but he’s pushing them as well, he’s pushing them in the right way and the guys who’ve been there for 20 years or more they recognise the similarities with him and Michael [Schumacher].”