Hamilton unfamiliar with Ferrari’s wet switches as rain is forecast in Melbourne

Lewis Hamilton has a steep learning curve ahead of him if the rain comes down during Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix. The Ferrari driver, who qualified eighth behind his team-mate Charles Leclerc, said he was unfamiliar with some switches in that context.

“Frickin’ hell, I’ve never driven the car in the wet,” he said on Saturday. “I don’t know which buttons I’m going to switch to tomorrow, so that’s going to be new.

“We’re using Brembos, which I’ve not used for a long, long time,” he said of the car’s brakes. “So I don’t know how the Brembos behave in the wet, or what settings we’re going to have to use with this car.”

Wet conditions are predicted for Albert Park tomorrow, with a 70% chance of midday showers. “When you qualify 8th you kind of hope for it to be wet, but I’ve only got three laps to learn the car in the wet and then get out [for the race],” he said. “It’s going to be a shock to the system, but I’m going to be learning on the fly and just giving it everything.”

Hamilton also admitted it had been a “slow process” finding “confidence” in the Ferrari. “When you have a problem with the car and you come in, normally when you’ve got the experience, you can say, ‘OK this is where I want to go with it’, but I don’t know which tool to use at the moment,” he said. “So I’m heavily relying for the first time on my engineers, and they’ve done a great job.”

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

In addition to the ‘wet switch’, there are several items on the car that Hamilton is yet to explore. “There’s a ton of tools that I’m still popping out like, ‘I’ve never tried that, what does it do?’” he said. The overall feel of the Ferrari is also “so different” from the Silver Arrows that he drove for the past 12 years.

“Braking and through-corner balance is a lot different to what I had [at Mercedes],” he explained. “The mechanical balance shift is much, much different… and the high-speed balance, the low-speed balance is quite a shift.”

However, Hamilton said he saw “improvements every single lap, session on session” throughout the weekend, even though he was consistently behind Leclerc.

“I’ve been down all weekend to Charles, who just had it from the get-go from the minute he went out,” the seven-time world champion said. “He knew what the car does but I was just building up to that through the weekend, and I think I got a lot closer towards it in the end.”