Gary Anderson: The veteran driver habits Hamilton must avoid at Ferrari

When Lewis Hamilton arrived at Maranello this week to start work ahead of his first Formula 1 season for Ferrari, neither team nor driver will have known exactly what to expect of each other.

Ferrari has had plenty of experience of successful drivers finally ending up with it - Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel to name but a few - all having achieved multiple world championship successes prior to their arrival. Hamilton is the latest on that list.

All these drivers came with in-depth experience of how other successful teams operate and with the knowledge of how the car gave them the opportunity to achieve that success.

Lewis has had plenty of experience of winning and how Mercedes operated during his time there, but the last three years have not been kind to him as far as results are concerned.

But even worse than the actual results, it’s the consistency that he really struggled with. When the Mercedes was good, it was very good, but when it was bad it was terrible and he didn’t cope well with that.

Hamilton will have a long list of what he wants to see that didn’t happen at Mercedes over the past three years in terms of how the car behaves. He knows the weaknesses of those cars all too well and in his early runs in Ferrari’s 2023 machinery he will have no doubt picked up plenty of differences.

But while he will be open to new ideas and different approaches, drivers with as long a history in F1 as him will, in reality, be looking to recreate something they had in the past. Certainly in my experience, this was often the case.

I always enjoyed working with younger drivers because they would be more willing to learn and adapt to the car and your way of working. Big names have their status and power for a reason and will expect the team to be built around them. Hamilton is trying to go into Ferrari open-minded, but simply because of his age and experience he cannot be as fresh in approach as a young driver would be.

The most famous example from my career was when Damon Hill arrived at Jordan in 1998. Yes, he’d had a difficult year with Arrows in 1997 but he’d won the world championship for Williams in 1996.

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For some unfathomable reason, Williams didn’t renew his contract - in plain English that means basically it fired him - so when he came to us he still had a lot to prove. That meant he came in with his own history, experience and expectations and for a team like us who were still suffering growing pains that wasn’t easy.

Early on, his feedback usually compared our car to what the Williams used to feel like. That’s all well and good and sometimes that knowledge can be useful, but the driver’s job is to make the best of the car that they have and sometimes an experienced driver is too set in their ways and doesn’t adapt as they should do.

This was a big problem when Damon arrived because the rules had changed to narrow-track cars and grooved tyres. These were major rule changes and meant this feedback was even less relevant.

My main measure for performance at the time was Damon's team-mate Ralf Schumacher. He was in his second season with us so knew how we operated and we understood what he wanted from a car. It took time for us as a team to optimise the design requirements to get the best from these regulation changes.

We had also changed from a very powerful Peugeot engine to a not-so-powerful Mugen-Honda, but once we’d fixed the problems with the car and Honda came along with a significant update mid-season things started to turn around, Damon did produce the performances you’d expect from him in the second half of the season. But it took time. The problem is that the more experienced you are, the more preconceptions you have.

It’s always frustrating when you sometimes feel you have to change things to simply keep the driver happy. The overall performance of any car is a very complicated package, and as I have always said you need to understand the problems before you can rectify them. Simply changing things blindly just wastes time, money and resource.

Also relevant here is that Hamilton - obviously a great driver - is, with the greatest of respect, is getting older. It doesn’t matter how hard you train or prepare for the big occasion, age means that you will lose that edge that younger drivers bring to the show. I’m pretty sure he will have questioned himself on more than one occasion over the last couple of seasons, and we need to remember he was one of those young hotshoes some 15 years ago.

He’s been in F1 since 2007, so will have more of those preconceived ideas than most. We have also got to remember that Mercedes hasn’t recently produced a car anywhere near as good as its 2014-2021 cars. Given what's happened in the last three years since these ground effect rules came into play, it might just be better for Lewis to forget the past and get on with the present. That’s something that could help Hamilton avoid looking for something that isn’t there and work as more of a reset than if he’d gone straight from winning titles at Mercedes to Ferrari.

The difference between my career with teams and the situation Hamilton is going into is that Ferrari is an established top frontrunning team. Ferrari hasn’t won a world championship since 2008 - but it has consistently won races over that period so the staff will all be hoping that he’s the final piece in the puzzle that will finally change their championship aspirations.

There will be times his experience will be useful, but if he’s trying to get these cars to replicate what he had in the past with Mercedes in the glory days then it’s likely he will be disappointed.

Gary's column first ran as an early access article for The Race Members' Club on Patreon. Join now for early access to more columns from our F1 team - including Mark Hughes' take on whether Hamilton will face the same unhappy fate at Ferrari as Vettel and Alonso did