Brutal ‘completely gone’ assessment in Hamilton’s ‘far too big’ gap to Leclerc

Lewis Hamilton in his Ferrari wheeled back to the garage by the crew

After Lewis Hamilton declared he needs a “brain transplant” and that there is “no fix” in sight, Giedo van der Garde says the Briton’s confidence is “completely gone”.

Hamilton endured yet another troubled weekend at the Jeddah Corniche circuit, where he brought his Ferrari F1 car home in seventh place without making up a single position in the Grand Prix.

Is there a light in the Lewis Hamilton tunnel?

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Although Hamilton made it into Q3, he was only seventh fastest, having crossed the line 0.9s down on pole sitter Oscar Piastri and six-tenths behind his team-mate Charles Leclerc.

“There’s tonnes of time just sitting there that I’m not extracting,” Hamilton admitted on Saturday.

“Losing two-tenths just in the last sector, three tenths in the first sector, a tenth in the middle sector. It’s just not good enough.”

But while he claimed at the time that it was “not the end of the world”, come Sunday he was a lot more downbeat.

Finishing the Grand Prix in seventh while Leclerc raced his way to the podium, and 30 seconds down on his team-mate, Hamilton was asked about his lack of pace.

“I don’t have an answer for you, no,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com. “There’s nothing. Balance, struggling to feel the car beneath me, but there’s no particular thing.

“It’s just, there’s nothing to say, ‘Hey, this is the issue.’”

“At the moment, there’s no fix,” he added. “This is how it’s going to be for the rest of the year. It’s just going to be painful.”

Leclerc’s first Grand Prix podium of the F1 2025 season meant he pulled 16 points clear of his team-mate as he leapfrogged Kimi Antonelli to move up to fifth place in the Drivers’ standings.

Hamilton remains seventh, where he is 68 points off the pace set by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.

Former F1 driver turned pundit Van der Garde believes Hamilton’s biggest problem right now is that he has absolutely no confidence in the Ferrari SF-25 as he doesn’t understand why the car is not working for him.

“He had no speed, really zero,” Van der Garde told Viaplay.

“Sometimes he was one and a half to two seconds a lap slower than Charles Leclerc. He also finished thirty seconds behind Leclerc.

“I think he doesn’t know what left and right is anymore, and that he really has a big problem. He cannot solve it himself. The gap is far too big. He has no confidence.”

“This is really bad,” he added. “He is a driver who needs to feel confident in the car anyway, but that’s completely gone.”

Asked if he thinks Hamilton can save the situation, the 39-year-old replied: “Not for the time being.

“If your team-mate drives away for thirty seconds… Except for that sprint qualifying in China, he has been beaten in every qualifying, and also with a big difference. That gets in your head.”

His fellow pundit Ho-Pin Tung, a former Renault test driver, added: “That lack of confidence is really reflected on this circuit. Towards the end of the race, when the track gets more grip, it starts to do better, because then the car slides less, then he could suddenly set the same lap times as the drivers in front of him.”