Lewis Hamilton’s wait for a first Ferrari podium finish is over amid a strong start to 2026 season for the seven-time world champion – so what’s next? watch every session of the Japanese GP this weekend live on Sky Sports F1 from Friday, with Sunday’s race starting at 6am

Lewis Hamilton is confident there is “more to come” from him in the 2026 season having finally broken his podium duck at Ferrari.

On his 26th race weekend appearance for F1’s most-famous team a fortnight ago in China, Hamilton raced strongly to claim third place behind the Mercedes drivers, and end what had become a career-worst 16-month podium drought, with his maiden rostrum finish as a Ferrari driver.

That third place in Shanghai followed on from a fourth-place finish at the season-opener in Melbourne, meaning Hamilton has enjoyed his best start to a season since 2021 – the last time he challenged for the world title – and now heads into this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix with momentum on his side as Ferrari aim to start closing the gap to early championship leaders Mercedes.

After what was statistically the least-successful season of his career in 2025, Hamilton has cut a consistently upbeat figure since the very start of pre-season this year. The opening two race events have also seen him run on team-mate Charles Leclerc’s pace, something he struggled to consistently do during a turbulent first podium-less season in red.

“I definitely feel like I’m back to my best, both mentally and physically,” said Hamilton after the race in Shanghai.

“I still think there’s room to improve.

“I think I can still eke out more performance from this car. I’m still learning about it as I go, particularly with [energy] deployment.

“I do think there’s more to come.”

Hamilton on setting his new mindset for 2026 on Christmas Day

It has certainly not been difficult to notice a step change in Hamilton’s demeanour since the seven-time world champion returned from F1’s winter break.

As an already-difficult first season at Ferrari spiralled downwards in the closing races of 2025 amid a succession of early qualifying exits, Hamilton cut an increasingly disconsolate figure in his media interviews and admitted at December’s season finale in Abu Dhabi that “I can’t wait to get away from all this”.

He also said that he was planning to “completely unplug for the matrix” in order to reset over the sport’s short off-season.

Three months on and that approach appears to have played handsome dividends.

“Training this winter has been the heaviest and the most intense that I’ve ever had, and that probably comes hand in hand with being older,” said Hamilton, who turned 41 in January. “It takes longer to recover.

“But I’ve managed to pull these new tools together. I’ve got a great trainer that I’ve been working with in the past, but we worked together since Christmas Day.

“Then the time at the factory, obviously new engineer, and that’s obviously been a real good boost as well. Great morale within the team.

“And as I said, I just decided on Christmas Day how I was going to start this season. I decided what I was going to do mentally and I’m going to continue to tweak that.”

Do new F1 cars suit Hamilton’s style better?

What also appears to be helping is the fact that Hamilton, unlike some of his peers, is enjoying driving the new-for-2026 F1 cars.

The revised challengers, which are narrower, lighter and feature a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power, have sharply split opinion among the sport’s drivers and fans but Hamilton, after raising some initial concerns over the complexity of the cars and associated energy-deployment rules, has seemingly embraced the challenge.

While such positivity is surely helped by the fact Ferrari have been very competitive so far, Hamilton has been effusive about the wheel-to-wheel racing he has both seen ahead of him and been involved in across the season’s first two rounds.

He even went as far to state after his back-and-forth battle with Leclerc in China that it “was the best racing I’ve ever experienced in F1”.

Sky Sports F1’s Anthony Davidson believes the move away from ground-effect cars of the previous four seasons has made a big difference for the sport’s most-successful driver.

Speaking on The F1 Show podcast, Davidson said: “It just goes to show that however experienced you are and however good you’ve been in previous iterations and generations of F1 car, that you can come across one that just doesn’t suit your style.

“I think he’s proving that the last ground effect era of Formula 1, the car just didn’t suit.

“Whether it was in a Mercedes or a Ferrari, it was the same story. Qualifying situations he didn’t understand, we didn’t understand, beaten by his team-mate, whether it was Leclerc or Russell – admittedly, fantastic qualifiers – but he’s got his qualifying speed back from what I can see so far and he enjoys driving the car.”

Davidson feels the turnaround in fortunes will serve as a “relief” to the Briton – and is good news for F1 as a whole.

“From the word go in the Barcelona Shakedown, he said: ‘this thing actually talks to me, I can get a read on what it’s going to do, I like the way it moves around’ and he responds well to that,” added Davidson.