"It works for me" – why Charles Leclerc isn't buying…

Simulators have grown in importance as opportunities to test current Formula 1 cars on track have declined. For all teams now, the simulator is not only an essential preparatory tool for arriving at each track with a reasonable setup, it also helps to evaluate the performance of new parts before they are added to the car.

Unless, that is, you're Lewis Hamilton, who has become increasingly vocal about his dissatisfaction with Ferrari's simulator – or rather, how his experiences in it fail to correlate with the SF-26r's on-track behaviour. His two best finishes this season have coincided with him eschewing the simulator in preparation, so he has declared himself done with it.

But team-mate Charles Leclerc doesn't agree.

"It doesn't affect my preparation at all," he said in Monaco when asked about Hamilton's opinion on the simulator.

"At the end, I think we all have our preferences. For me, the simulator has been working very well.

"This is what I've done since arriving in Formula 1. I'm not going to change that because it's been a very powerful tool for me in the past.

"Also, very often we do changes on the car based on what we try on the simulator back at home, so it's part of the developing process of the car. Yeah, it works for me, so I'll keep going there."

The contrasting views of Leclerc and Hamilton demonstrate the importance of routine, habit, and pattern recognition to a Formula 1 driver, as well as the psychological foundations of confidence. Leclerc believes it works, Hamilton doesn't.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari (Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images)

It's important to separate the process of using the simulator from the driver's perception of the results. Michael Schumacher, famously, couldn't use the simulator when he made his 2010 F1 comeback with Mercedes because it gave him motion sickness.

Fundamentally, motion sickness is a result of the hypothalamus triggering a surge in the stress hormone cortisol when it is unable to resolve conflicting information from the eyes and inner ears: one indicates the body is in motion, the other doesn't. Hamilton's issue with the simulator is that he doesn't believe it accurately replicates the real behaviour of the car, and is therefore a waste of time and mental bandwidth.

Until the late 2000s, teams could conduct unlimited track testing outside grand prix weekends – unlimited, that is, except by budget. Most of the leading organisations operated separate test teams dedicated to the task.

In Max Mosley's final years as FIA president, he made it his mission to cut costs, or at least reduce expenditure, by trying to limit testing. He got his way in 2007 with an initial mileage restriction, but the global financial crisis then enabled him to deliver the coup de grace and ban in-season testing from 2009 onwards.

The details have changed somewhat in the intervening years, but testing remains tightly restricted and this has had the effect of channelling development elsewhere, into the virtual world. The need to test has not gone away – far from it.

Shaving Friday practice sessions from 90 minutes to 60, and the increasing number of sprint weekends where there is just one hour of practice, has made arriving with a good baseline setup even more important then before. There is very little time to waste.

But the virtual nature of simulator testing introduces the possibility of drifting away from real-world behaviour, and several teams have reported correlation issues with their virtual tools in recent years. Red Bull attributed its competitive wobble from 2024 onwards to poor correlation across all its tools, from the simulator to the windtunnel.

Second place in Canada was Hamilton's best grand prix finish for Ferrari (Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images)

Hamilton's beef with the Ferrari simulator is clearly based on a feeling, but what's unusual is that Leclerc clearly doesn't agree. It's unlikely that the same simulator produces different results for both drivers.

"If you look at the two best races I've had [this season]," Hamilton said after finishing second in the Canadian Grand Prix, "I didn't use a simulator and that's honestly how it was.

"Pretty much all the championships before, except for probably 2008, I didn't use the sim, so it's not a necessity."

Critics may accuse Hamilton of defective induction here, because his reasoning is based on a very limited sample set. You could very easily argue that in this case, correlation doesn't necessarily causation, any more than if a driver happened to achieve their best finishes in a season while wearing their lucky underpants.

But belief, peculiar as it may seem, is a vital component of driver psychology. What matters is what works – and if Hamilton believes poring over real-world data helps him achieve better setups than the simulator, that is clearly working for him.

The real test will be when a race weekend goes south for Hamilton while he maintains his no-sim policy. How to rationalise that one?