Lewis Hamilton is not softening his tone at Maranello. After a season marked by friction, a public investigation into the SF-26 and a Mexico City collision with Charles Leclerc that cost Ferrari a likely one-two, the seven-time world champion has told Ferrari staff and the media that his drive to reshape the team is only accelerating.

“I’ve pushed for so many changes, and I’m going to be pushing for more, and as long as I’m here, that’s how it’s going to be,” Hamilton told RacingNews365.

It is a blunt line in the sand from a driver who, 20 months into his move from Mercedes, is still trying to bend one of the sport’s most tradition-bound organisations around his way of working. Leclerc, by contrast, has nine Ferrari wins and nearly a decade in the Ferrari academy behind him.

Chassis signed off, engine the priority

Hamilton’s immediate task is narrower than his longer pitch suggests. With three races left, Ferrari holds a 95-point cushion over Red Bull in the constructors’ standings and Hamilton sits fourth in the drivers’ championship, one point behind George Russell.

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“Well, we’ve got to work to make sure we hold on to second in the Constructors’ Championship, because that impacts everyone back in the factory,” Hamilton said.

For 2027, Hamilton told reporters at Interlagos that he is already working with Ferrari’s head of aerodynamics and head of vehicle dynamics, and that the power unit department is where he sees the biggest gap to close. He has also said he believes Ferrari can fight for the title next year if the engine deficit is fixed.

Russell the outlier on wet tyres

The second storyline running out of São Paulo is less flattering for Pirelli. The Brazilian Grand Prix weekend was the first real competitive test of the 2026 wet-weather compounds, with heavy rain in qualifying and a wet-dry-wet race on Sunday. By the time the paddock packed up, most drivers were making the same complaint.

Russell, who qualified second in the rain for Mercedes, was the dissenting voice.

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“It has been substantially better than we all anticipated,” he told RacingNews365.

Almost everyone else disagreed. Isack Hadjar was the sharpest, calling the aquaplaning in qualifying genuinely unsafe, and Carlos Sainz said flatly that “the intermediate and rain tyres aren’t good enough” when speaking to reporters at Interlagos.

“I think there’s room for improvement with the tyres, because I find it a bit dangerous,” Hadjar said.

Max Verstappen described the extreme wet and intermediate as workable when hot and “really like a rock” when cold, and pointed to the narrow operating window as the central problem. Alex Albon called the wet tyre “really poor”; Lando Norris warned that a cold wet race in Las Vegas later this month could be “horrible” on the current rubber.

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Pirelli’s 2027 answer

Pirelli has already conceded. The supplier is working on a new wet-weather specification for 2027, with the warm-up of the intermediate the main target, after the Brazil weekend convinced the paddock the current construction cannot cover the full range of wet conditions on the 2026 cars. The stiffer construction and higher pressures required to cope with active aerodynamics are part of why the compounds behave the way they do.

The next race is in Las Vegas on 22 November, and forecasts of cold temperatures are already feeding driver anxiety about how the current intermediate will behave if the track is damp.

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