Lewis Hamilton believes he has “dramatically” shortened his adjustment period with Ferrari by carrying out an extensive pre-season TPC programme, says Ted Kravitz.

Kravitz’s comments come amid ‘rumours’ from paddock insiders that Ferrari will start the new season ‘from pole position’ as their SF-25 has overtaken McLaren’s MCL39 as the car to beat.

Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari: ‘There is nothing not to like’

After months of predictions with pundits putting forward their promises and doubts, F1 2025 begins in Bahrain on Wednesday with the start of three days of pre-season testing.

While the Bahrain outing by no means determines the upcoming season, which gets underway on March 16 with the Australian Grand Prix, it could give some indication as to who has got it right with their 2025 cars and who has missed the target.

Hamilton will be in action on the opening morning, putting the SF-25 through its paces in his first group outing as a Ferrari Formula 1 driver. After 12 years and six World Championships with Mercedes, last year Hamilton announced one final throw of the dice as the Briton chases an elusive eighth title in a move to Ferrari.

The 40-year-old took part in an extensive pre-season programme with Ferrari as he completed all four of his permitted TPC [Testing Previous Car] for the year behind the wheel of Ferrari’s 2023 F1 car while also driving a modified SF-24 during a Pirelli tyre test.

Kravitz, speaking on the The F1 Show podcast, claims Hamilton feels that running allowed him to acclimatise quicker than he did when he swapped from McLaren to Mercedes in 2013.

“There is nothing not to like about this story,” he said of Hamilton to Ferrari. “We will reflect the interest and enthusiasm of our audience as long as it stays interesting.

“If they are finishing third and fourth, then we’ll stop talking about them. But if we start winning, then obviously we’re going to talk about them.

“But having the seven-time World Champion, most successful driver, a great GOAT in a Ferrari, and the challenge that he’s going to have against Charles Leclerc is going to be really, really interesting.

“And what I did find, the main takeaway from the interview I did with him at the launch, is that he said that he was expecting, based on his previous team moves, to need a kind of six-month transition in getting to know a team and to be up here. And he is confident that he has shortened that dramatically.

“We might still hear [him saying] come Melbourne or the end of testing: ‘Oh, I’m maybe a few months behind, a few weeks behind.’

“But part of the whole testing of the previous car stuff in Fiorano and Barcelona, part of all of that was just short, cutting, shrinking that period of acclimatisation, and so that he is expecting, hoping, planning on being right up there with Leclerc at the beginning of the season.”

Hamilton and his team-mate Charles Leclerc have already covered 100km each in the new Ferrari SF-25, a car that Simon Lazenby reckons shows Ferrari are not “afraid” to make bold decisions.

“Ferrari have taken some bold steps with what they’re doing with the car,” he said. “It seems like they’re not afraid. They felt that they’d got to the limits, didn’t they, with what they had before.

“They’ve gone pullrod suspension at the front as well at the back. And they feel like that gives their aero team enough to work with, that they can then continue the trajectory that they’re on because they had momentum. And if you look at the average lap times between themselves in races between themselves and McLaren it’s thousandths of seconds now.”

Thousandths that, according to Gazzetta dello Sport, favour Ferrari this season.

The Italian publication is reporting that the ‘rumour’ from paddock insiders is that Ferrari will ‘start from pole position’ having overtaken McLaren with the SF-25.

‘The new SF-25 is the result of more extreme research than the Ferraris that preceded it and immediately seemed very fast,’ read the report.

But whether that comes to pass, Ferrari and their rivals will have a better idea come Wednesday evening.