Lewis Hamilton prepared to 'back away' from troubled Ferrari driver aid

Lewis Hamilton is prepared to "back away" from using Ferrari's F1 simulator after he felt it had given him the wrong direction for the Miami GP. 

Hamilton, who has not been a frequent user of simulators across his 20 seasons in F1,  started the Miami weekend "on the back foot", after qualifying seventh for the Sprint and then finishing there before converting his sixth on the grand prix to seventh on the road before shuffling up to sixth once team-mate Charles Leclerc's penalty was applied.

Reflecting on his weekend, Hamilton felt that if he had started his base setup closer to Leclerc's, he could have unlocked stronger results - and felt that the simulator at Maranello had steered him in the wrong direction. 

"Ultimately, it is always correlation, and when we go on it, and then you get to the track, the car feels different," Hamilton explained to media, including RacingNews365. 

"You know I don't like simulators in general, but I was on the simulator every week in the build-up to this race and working on correlation constantly.

"You prepare for the track, you drive it, and you get the car set up to a certain place, and then you come to the track, and that setup doesn't work. 

"In the Sprint weekend, you've only got practice one, you don't really want to veer off from your set-up too far, like with a big suspension change, and so you stay with it, and then you make a change going into qualifying, and you've only got six laps to get on top of it. 

"In an ideal world, I should have started where Charles was at the beginning of the weekend in FP1, and I think we would have had a stronger weekend from there.

"So I am not going to go on the simulator between now and the next race, and I'll still go and hold meetings in the factory and back away from it a little bit. When we went to China, I had the best weekend without the simulator.

"We just started on the wrong foot, so the car was very snappy on the way into corners, and had massive understeer at mid-corner, so that's not the balance you want, but it was better for qualifying going into the race.

"So that's not the balance that you'd want. It was better for qualifying than going into the race, but we weren't able to really capitalise on it."