Ferrari’s disappointing Australian Grand Prix qualifying performance still afforded the first meaningful comparison between new Formula 1 team-mates Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.
Hamilton will start his first race for Ferrari eighth, one place behind Leclerc after qualifying 0.238s slower - a deficit the seven-time world champion was a lot happier with than a lot of his qualifying defeats to George Russell at Mercedes last year.
That is because Hamilton felt it was a good foundation to be “that close” to such a “great qualifier” at the first attempt, given the undeniable advantage Leclerc has started the season with in Melbourne.
Hamilton openly admitted after qualifying it has been “a lot slower process for me to build confidence in the car”, which he described as “so much different than I’ve ever experienced” at the Albert Park circuit.
“If you look at the high speed everywhere, I've been down all weekend to Charles, who just had it from the get go,” Hamilton said.
“From just the minute he went out, he knew what the car does. And me, I was just building up to that through the weekend.
“I think I got a lot closer towards it in the end.”
He did - in execution, if not in laptime. Hamilton was within two tenths of Leclerc in Q1, but needed a second run to achieve that. Then he was within a tenth in Q2. This marked a clear progress across Saturday, and especially compared to Friday.
On the first day of track running in Australia, there was a notable difference between the two drivers’ styles.
Hamilton was more attacking into braking zones, braking later and harder than Leclerc and slowing the car down more. He was effective in getting the car rotated to get back on the throttle quickly, but the time loss mid-corner to Leclerc was consistent, even if it was only marginal - a few hundredths at several slow and medium-speed corners.
This was already different to what was seen last year when Hamilton would often bleed time to Russell in one corner with a big rear slide either from struggling with the way the Mercedes rear let go, or by committing to a too-aggressive corner entry that the car simply could not handle.
But more interesting was how Hamilton quickly adjusted this approach on Saturday. It was already noticeable in FP3 that he was closer to Leclerc’s style through the Turn 1-2 Esses and the Turn 3 right-hander, lifting a little more and braking a little earlier in both places. By qualifying, Hamilton’s speed trace tended to follow a more similar shape to Leclerc’s - a higher minimum speed, rather than a sharper drop off, as he rolled through the corner faster.
This was not the work of a moment. When asked how long he thought it would take to be fully comfortable, Hamilton admitted “I really, really don't know”.
“Honestly, I thought I was further along than I was,” he said. “And then I got here, FP1, and I was like, ‘Jesus, I still got a way to go!’
“But, there’s still a ton of tools that I'm still [unsure of]... and he's probably, like, ‘hey, what about this?’ - I'm like, ‘I've never tried that. What does it do?’
“And it's one thing, saying it, but actually going out and feeling it...that's why I'm just really [going] bit by bit.
“We did some good work in trying to move the car forward. But when you have a problem in 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.
“So I'm heavily relying, for the first time, on my engineers, and they've done a great job.
“But in the past, I would say, ‘this is what I want, that setting, this setting’, and I can't do that at the moment.”
Where Hamilton was still lacking most on Saturday was, as he mentioned, the high speed. He was routinely considerably slower through Turn 6, the very fast right hander that flings the cars down the long kinked ‘straight’ to the high-speed Esses, and compromises the entire middle sector.
Above is a close-up of how Turn 6 looked in Q2. You can see how Leclerc (red line) keeps more throttle on (bottom graph) and then starts to apply a little more, a little earlier than Hamilton (white line) and how that corresponds with a higher minimum speed on the top graph, and a jump in the delta time on the middle graph.
By Q3, Hamilton had trimmed this deficit to just a few hundredths of a second as well - but it is clear that he lacked the same swagger as Leclerc at Turn 6 and also the medium-high speed Turn 12 right-hander late in the lap (as shown by the arrows below). Both corners, Hamilton needed bigger lifts than Leclerc - he was consistently using around 20% less throttle in Turn 12 - and a little confidence-boosting dab of the brakes too.
Part of that is Hamilton’s comfort in the car still being built. Part is a wonderfully effective Leclerc trait to overlap the throttle and the brake in order to keep his minimum speed higher.
Leclerc tends to use a little bit of throttle to help rotate the car, whereas Hamilton was notably slightly later in increasing his throttle input again - waiting until the rotation had been completed. This usually meant Hamilton was back on full throttle faster, but could not enough to compensate for the time lost mid-corner.
By Q3, there were micro-differences in their styles. Some places Hamilton would gain a tiny bit by sacrificing corner entry speed for a better exit (like Turn 3, Turns 4/5 as shown below or the high-speed Turn 9/10 combination), other places Leclerc would be faster (like Turn 11, where he looked more comfortable getting the car stopped and turned in without overslowing it all through qualifying).
Overall, Leclerc retained an edge. The final Q3 deficit would have been closer had Hamilton not dropped a tenth and a half in the first corner scrubbing off too much speed on the entry, but Leclerc did not complete his final lap so it could also be said that these laps did not end up being a completely representative comparison anyway.
What is already clear is that Hamilton’s trends of last year have not been repeated at the first attempt at Ferrari, and there are hints of areas he can and is faster than Leclerc.
This is no guarantee of success at Ferrari, just a continuation of an encouraging start that still leaves him optimistic.
It will be in chasing the final hundredths everywhere that Hamilton will discover if he can be a match for the “great qualifier” Leclerc in the end.
