Fred Vasseur has no problems with Lewis Hamilton’s downbeat TV pen interviews. The Ferrari team principal revealed that, even at the seven-time world champion’s lowest ebb during the final weeks of the 2025 season, he wasted no time getting to work with the engineers after returning from his media duties.

The 2025 season was unprecedented for Hamilton and his supporters. The legendary Brit failed to secure a podium and struggled to extract lap time from the SF-25 during qualifying, meaning he often started races multiple rows behind his team-mate, Charles Leclerc.

This uncharacteristic slump reached a nasty climax during the season-ending triple header in Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, where Hamilton was knocked out in Q1 in three successive weekends. He ended the year just six points ahead of rookie Kimi Antonelli in the Drivers’ Championship standings.

Throughout the year, Hamilton gave a series of media pen interviews that left fans and pundits concerned, but Vasseur isn’t worried about the 40-year-old’s downbeat responses in front of the TV cameras.

“When you are out in Q1, I hope the driver is mega upset with himself and with the team,” Vasseur said, looking at Hamilton’s media pen comments. “I’m not sure that you, journalist, you prefer to have someone going to the TV pen saying, ‘no, everything is normal, blah, blah, blah’ – all the usual bulls***.

“I respect perfectly the position of the drivers when they have this attitude. Then, the most important for me is also to have someone collaborating with the team. It’s much better to have someone not speaking in the TV pen and coming back to the debriefing, speaking with the engineers, trying to find solutions.

“And it’s the attitude that Lewis had even when he had a tough moment in the last part of the season, and this is putting a positive energy into the team. Now, honestly, and I have exactly the same situation with all of you, that when you are jumping on me, and I’m going down to the pitwall after a tough race, and you have tons of questions, sometimes I don’t want to spend too much time to answer the questions.”

Vasseur also accepted that the team had underestimated the scale of the challenge facing Hamilton after his departure from Mercedes, where he won six Drivers’ Championship titles and spent 12 seasons.

“It was difficult for Lewis,” he continued. “I personally underestimate the step. It’s not that we are doing worse or better, it’s that we are just doing differently. It’s not just about the food or the weather, it’s that every single software is different, every single component is different. The people around him, they were different.”