Lewis Hamilton has spent more time on Ferrari's simulator in 2026 than any other factory tool — and he has decided that is exactly the problem.
In a striking admission ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, the seven-time world champion confirmed he is going to skip simulator preparation completely between now and Montreal. It is a sharp departure from how Hamilton has approached his first season at Ferrari, and a quiet vote of no confidence in the correlation between Maranello's virtual model and the actual SF-26 car.
"I'm going to have a different approach in the next race," Hamilton said. "Because the way we're preparing at the moment is, it's not helping."
Hamilton has never made a secret of his ambivalence toward simulator work, but the move from Mercedes to Ferrari has effectively forced him into the rig week after week. With less than a year inside the team, the Briton has been burning hours trying to learn the SF-26's idiosyncrasies and feed information back to the engineering team — only to walk into race weekends and discover the car behaves differently from what the model predicts.
"I don't like simulators in general, but I'm at the simulator every week in the build-up to this race and working on correlation constantly."
His decision for Canada is to break the cycle entirely.
"I'm not going to go on the simulator between now and the next race [in Canada]. I'll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff — but I'm just going to back away from it for a little bit and see."
The reasoning is built around a single data point that has stuck in Hamilton's mind. Earlier in the season, he scored his first Ferrari podium in China — a weekend he reached without the customary block of pre-event sim laps.
"When we went to China I had the best weekend without the sim."
That single race weekend has become Hamilton's reference point. If skipping the sim cleared his mind ahead of the Shanghai podium, he wants to see whether the same approach can flip his form again at a track — Montreal — where his record is one of the strongest on the grid. He has won the Canadian Grand Prix seven times, more than any other driver in F1 history.
The wider context for Ferrari is uncomfortable. The team brought what was called the largest upgrade package of any frontrunning team to Miami, only to watch Charles Leclerc lose more than 20 seconds to the Mercedes pace and crash on the final lap. Hamilton's own Miami weekend was equally compromised, and the 2026 SF-26 has now spent multiple grands prix punching well below the spec sheet.
Hamilton's move puts pressure squarely on the simulator group at Maranello. If a driver of his calibre is publicly stating that weekly sim work "is not helping" and is willing to test that thesis at one of his strongest circuits, Ferrari will need a clean explanation either way: if Hamilton thrives without the rig, the correlation problem becomes the headline; if he struggles, the SF-26's race pace becomes harder still to ignore.
For Montreal, at least, the experiment is on. Hamilton is stepping away from the screens, and trusting his hands to find the answer instead.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/hamilton-s-radical-canada-plan-he-s-walking-away-from-the-simulator). Visit for full coverage.*