Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton has revealed that he is advising Ferrari on the areas where it needs to improve.

While Christian Horner's sacking is likely to be the big story of 2025, though it could yet be topped by a shock move by Max Verstappen, Hamilton's move to Ferrari hasn't turned out to be the fairy-tale many had been hoping for.

His only visit to the podium came in China after winning the Sprint, and currently he is sixth in the standings, sixteen points down on his teammate.

Nobody expected it to be easy, but then again, based on the Maranello outfit's improvements in 2024, nobody expected it to be this difficult, especially the British driver himself, which is probably why he now appears to be taking matters into his own hands, digging deep into the experience gained over the last 19 seasons.

"I see a huge amount of potential within this team," he told reporters at Spa. "The passion... nothing comes close to that.

"It is a huge organisation and there's a lot of moving parts and not all of them are firing on all the cylinders that need to be," he admitted. "That's ultimately why the team's not had the success that I think it deserves. I feel that it's my job to challenge absolutely every area, to challenge everybody in the team, particularly the guys that are at the top who are making the decisions.

"If you look at the team over the last twenty years, they've had amazing drivers. You've had Kimi, you've had Fernando, you've had Sebastian... all world champions. However, they didn't win a world championship. I refuse for that to be the case with me."

Fact is, Kimi Raikkonen did win his title with Ferrari (in 2007, Hamilton's debut season), however he is correct about Alonso and Vettel, and going further back there was Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell. World champions all, and in each case it wasn't the driver that failed to deliver it was the team.

"I'm going the extra mile," insisted Hamilton. "I'm obviously very fortunate to have had experiences in two other great teams. Whilst things are for sure going to be different because it's a different culture and everything, I think sometimes if you take the same path all the time, you get the same results.

"I'm challenging certain things," he admitted. "They've been incredibly responsive. We've been improving in so many areas through marketing, through everything we did continuously delivering responses.

"The way the engineers continue to work, there's lots of work and improvements to be made, but they're very responsive. I guess ultimately just trying to recreate allies within the organisation and get them geed up, get them pushing.

"I'm here to win!" he declared.

"I was at the factory for two weeks, a couple of days each week," he revealed, referring to the break since Silverstone. "We did preparation, going over where we were on the previous race, things that we need to change. I held a lot of meetings. I've called on lots of meetings with the heads of the team. I've sat with John (Elkann, Ferrari president), Benedetto (Vigna, CEO) and Fred in several meetings. I've sat with the head of our car development, with Loic (Serra, technical director), with also the heads of different departments, talking about the engine for next year, talking about front suspension for next year, talking about rear suspension for next year, things that you want, issues that you have that I have with this car. I've sent documents through the year. After the first few races, I did a full document for the team. Then during this break, I had another two documents that I sent in.

"Then I come in and want to address some of its structural adjustments that we need to make as a team in order to get better in all the areas that we want to improve. Then the other one was really about the car, the current issues that I have with this car, that some things that you do want to take on to the next year's car and some that you need to work on changing for next year. We did development for, tried the 2026 car for the first time and started work on that."

Asked about the suspension upgrade the team is to try this weekend, he said: "We'll get to test the suspension tomorrow and I'm sure there's going to be learnings from it. We'll kind of figure out how to fine tune it and to try to extract performance from it. On the simulator, there's no difference, but I'm sure across different circuits, perhaps, there'll be benefits. So, I think for me, the positive thing is, arriving at the filming day, you see that new bits are coming.

"You see that we are getting development because in general, we had an upgraded floor in Bahrain and then it was quite some time before we got another upgrade, I think it was Austria. And so pace-wise, it wasn't necessarily to what I would have thought we would have. If you look at some of the other teams, they bring in small pieces every single weekend, like Red Bull often do or Mercedes do, for example, but these are more like big chunks along the way.

"I was just really happy to see that there clearly is a big push back at the factory," he continued. "There are a lot of changes and then to see the results of those changes takes time. So I was just really grateful to see that we've got new parts. We'll try and put them to use this weekend."

Asked about Hamilton's 'documents', teammate Charles Leclerc said: "I think it's always interesting to have a person and, in that case, Lewis coming from a very different culture, from a very different team, from working with Mercedes-Benz for so many years and to obviously point out a few of the things.

"I don't think that this is very different to the team-mates that I've had in my career in a way that we are all here to make the team better, and we are all doing this kind of documents in order to point out those points. So on that there's nothing different. However, obviously it's a unique point of view and Lewis had an incredible career, so yeah, these are things that we are looking closely at.

"But it didn't only start now," he added. "It starts from the first race where you have the first points where things are different and you've got to get used to and other things that you want to change and this is part of the process. So I don't think there's anything standing out now.

"I think maybe it's the first time he said it so that's why it makes such a reaction, but it's nothing particular to this moment."

Check out our Friday gallery from Spa here.