(Motorsport-Total.com) – Lewis Hamilton is not thinking about retiring from Formula 1 and firmly rejects the insinuations of those who want to “send him into retirement.”
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The seven-time world champion emphasizes before the Canadian Grand Prix that he still wants to stay in Formula 1 “for quite a while” – with the intention of spending the next years at Ferrari. When switching to the team from Maranello, Hamilton signed a multi-year contract, which is understood to be for three years; this would bind him contractually until the end of 2027.
“Yes, I still have a contract. So everything is 100 percent clear for me. And yes, I am still focused. I am still motivated,” emphasizes Hamilton, who has recovered somewhat after a difficult 2025 season and is significantly closer to teammate Charles Leclerc.
He makes it clear: “I love what I do with all my heart. And I will be here for quite a while. So get used to it. There are many people trying to send me into retirement. I don’t waste a single thought on that.”
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“I am already thinking about what comes next. I am planning for the next five years. But yes, I definitely intend to be here for a while longer.”
Various experts have urged Hamilton in recent weeks to hang up his helmet. Former driver Ralf Schumacher, now an expert at Sky Germany, suggested that both Hamilton and 44-year-old Fernando Alonso should “give young people a chance” instead of continuing to race in Formula 1.
Hamilton’s cockpit was recently linked with Haas driver Oliver Bearman, a product of the Ferrari Driver Academy, but he will probably have to wait at least another year before he is considered for a Ferrari cockpit.
Ferrari simulator fantastic, but data analysis preferred
After four races in the 2026 season, Hamilton is fifth in the World Championship and is performing significantly better than last year, when he could not even reach the podium. In Canada, the Briton wants to deliver the next good result, but his preparation remains unconventional: Hamilton skipped working in the simulator in Maranello.
Instead, he focused on analyzing the data from the first four races of the season together with his engineers to optimize the balance of his Ferrari SF-26 – especially when braking.
He explains that this decision is rooted in his more frequent use of the Ferrari simulator last year, as he felt the device often gave a distorted picture of the conditions he actually faced on race weekends.
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“I didn’t use the simulator,” he confirms, although he emphasizes that the simulator is “fantastic.” “It’s a great place to work. It’s the best simulator I’ve ever seen. And it’s a great team of people I can work with there. A day in the simulator is actually pretty incredible.”
“It’s a very, very powerful tool that we as a team keep developing. I think since I’ve been there, I’ve given a lot of input to drive this development, and they have been very responsive and made countless changes. We’ve just kept improving it,” he says.
“I just find: Last year I used it every week. And most of the time it was like this: You do all the work in the simulator, get to the track, find a setup you feel comfortable with – and then everything is completely different on site. So you undo the things you learned.”
“You have to shift and adjust the way you approach the corners. A setup that felt good in the simulator is sometimes not the same on the track,” says Hamilton. “Sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn’t.”
“So it’s a bit of a gamble. This time I just decided to skip it and focus more on the data. So we dug very deep: corner balance, mechanical balance, corner entries, brake balance, optimizing the brakes – that has been a problem for me for some time.”
However, Hamilton emphasizes that this does not mean he will never sit in the simulator again. “I think we will definitely continue to use it, especially on the topic of energy deployment.”
“What I’ve done in the last six months: You go in after the weekend and work on the correlation. And then when we race again, you come to the next track and sometimes it still doesn’t quite fit.”
“We’ll see how the weekend goes. But China, for example – I did the same there, and that was my best weekend.”
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