#lh sim

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Getting some extra laps in (virtually) 🎮

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Lewis Hamilton critical of Ferrari F1 simulator for 'sending me in wrong direction'

Lewis Hamilton feels Ferrari's simulator hasn't been helping him, following a tough Saturday in Miami

“It was an improvement,” he said when asked about the qualifying session by Crash.net.

“We made lots of changes to the car, we didn't have software issues. So I think we progressed, we stepped forward. I think Q2 was feeling really solid, and then when I got to Q3 I just wasn't able to extract the maximum."

Asked about the potential to move forward in Sunday’s race he said: “I don't feel comfortable in P6, that's not where I want to be. So quite unhappy with P6, naturally, but I'm happy that we made changes going to qualifying and we progressed. We did improve. I think top three was probably possible, so I just got to work on it.”

He made it clear that had he found the ideal set-up earlier in the weekend, he would be much better off.

“If I could start with what I had today, yesterday, and had that practice of driving the car as it was today, because it was miles different from the sprint, and from yesterday. So I really need to deep on that.

“And if I'm honest, I think the simulator really sends me in the wrong direction. So I think I might cut that out now.”

Ferrari came to Miami with a longer list of upgrades than any rival, although Hamilton suggested that McLaren had been more successful with its package.

“The team worked incredibly hard to bring those components,” he said. “And it's a step, but the others have also taken a step.

"I heard McLaren brought a step, but it was worth much more than they anticipated. That's not how we've experienced ours.”

He also made some intriguing comments about Ferrari’s main rivals.

“They're doing something different – Mercedes and McLaren and Red Bull are something different with their front wing to us. So we need to look into that to see whether or not there's something we can improve on.”

Asked to clarify what he meant he said: “Concept. If you just look at everyone else's wing and look at ours, you'll see it looks different.

“I don't know if that's necessarily the whole thing, but I wonder what that's doing, because the others seem to have it, and they've improved something."

Hamilton remains upbeat about Sunday’s race.

“I'm expecting tomorrow the car to feel a lot better, but it's going to be wet. I'm confident with the balance that I have today, and in the wet, hopefully we should be in a good place."

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Getting some extra laps in (virtually) 🎮

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Sir Lewis Hamilton on April break, what was losing him time in Japan, and the regulation changes in effect this weekend. "Been on the sim[ulator] pretty much every week, been at the factory every week and just a lot of training and preparation, just going over the first three races and particularly the last one trying to understand, obviously I left feeling that we were down on power, it wasn't the engine but there were certain things that, a combination of things that were losing me eight to nine tenths a lap so we figured those things out and we worked those out and also the regulation changes made, it's going to be interesting to see what difference it makes."

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Lewis Hamilton followed through on his plan to ditch using Ferrari’s Formula 1 simulator ahead of this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix.

On Thursday in Montreal, Hamilton revealed he’d stuck to that no-simulator strategy despite calling Ferrari’s simulator an "amazing space".

He continued: "It is a very, very powerful tool and something that as a team, we continue to evolve. I think since I've been there, I've had a lot of input in some of this evolution and they’ve been really respondent and made loads and loads of changes, and we've just been improving it.

"With simulation, I feel that the goalpost is always moving. So I started driving the simulator in 1997, the first simulator. It probably didn't move, but we had force feedback in the steering wheel, and I remember it was at McLaren's old factory.

"And then when it moved to like the first real gen, they let me sometimes use it when I was in GP2. And then at McLaren, we used it relatively often, didn't again particularly enjoy it, but because they're kind of long days and a lot of laps. There's a point at which you stop learning when you're doing so many laps, for me personally.

"And then when I joined Mercedes, they were quite far off with the sim at the time. I didn't use it in all the championships that we won, barely used the simulator. Very, very rarely. And then it was 2020, maybe 2021, I decided to use it a little bit more.

"I think there's only ever been really one time that I've used the sim in these 20 years, that the set-up that I had on the sim was the exact set-up I used in qualifying and qualified pole. I think it was Singapore 2012 [with McLaren].

"So then all the other times, it's not quite perfect, but it is a powerful tool. I just think that since the last year, I used it every week. And more often than not, I felt, you do all the work on the sim and you get to the track, you find a set-up that you're comfortable with, you get to the track, and it's everything's opposite.

"So then you're undoing the things you've learned, some of the ways you've approached the corners, you have to shift and adjust set-up that you felt that was good on the simulator is not the same at the track sometimes. Sometimes it is. And so it's kind of hit and miss." 

What Hamilton focused on instead

No simulator work doesn’t mean Hamilton didn’t do any preparation for Montreal, as he instead focused on working through data with his engineers. 

"So I just decided for this one, I'm just going to sit it out and focus more on the data.

So there was just a lot of deep diving on, through corner balance, mechanical balance, corner approaches, brake balance, optimising the brakes, which had been a problem for me for some time, and that's led to really good integration with my engineers. 

"So it's not a tool that I'm saying I'm never going to use again. I think it's something that for sure we will continue to utilise, particularly on power deployment. 

"So most often what I've done for the last like six months, you'd go in after the weekend and you'd work on correlation. So that when we run it again, but then you go to the next track and it's slightly off sometimes.

"We'll see how the weekend goes. But, China, for example, I didn't have to do the same for China, and it was my best weekend."

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Why Lewis Hamilton is ditching Ferrari F1 simulator after worrying claim

Lewis Hamilton believes Ferrari's F1 simulator misled him at the Miami Grand Prix.