Gridlock in Montreal: Hamilton Ditches the Sim While Herta Battles the F2 Learning Curve

The upcoming race weekend in Montreal is shaping up to be a serious vibe check for two drivers at entirely different stages of their careers. Whether you’re a seven-time world champion or a 27-year-old phenom trying to break into the paddock, sometimes the standard preparation just doesn’t cut it. Both Lewis Hamilton and Colton Herta are heading into the Canadian Grand Prix weekend carrying heavy doubts, albeit for wildly different reasons.

For Hamilton, it’s about pulling the plug on digital prep. After a highly frustrating run in Miami, the Ferrari driver has decided to completely overhaul his approach for Montreal by ditching the simulator. Outside of a solid showing in Shanghai—ironically, the only race he didn’t use the sim for—the Brit has been playing second fiddle to his teammate Charles Leclerc for most of the 2026 season. Miami was a tough watch. Hamilton was 0.379 seconds off Leclerc’s pace in sprint qualifying, and 0.176 seconds down in the main session. By race day, he found himself a massive 24 seconds behind before Leclerc’s chaotic final lap, where the Monégasque spun, tapped the wall, and picked up a penalty for cutting a corner.

The root of Hamilton’s headache is a massive disconnect between the virtual and the real. He’s admitted that the endless hours logged in the simulator are straight-up lying to him about the SF-26’s actual track behavior. In Florida, the car was sluggish on turn-in and bogged down by heavy mid-corner understeer, forcing a complete rethink. “I’m taking a different approach for the next race, because the way we’re preparing right now just isn’t helping,” noted Hamilton, who currently sits fifth in the drivers’ standings. As a guy who notoriously isn’t a fan of sim work anyway, he had actually been putting in weekly shifts leading up to Miami to fix their correlation issues. But as he put it: you put the time in on the sim, prep the track, dial the car into a certain baseline, and then you show up on Friday and the setup is garbage. When you’re dealing with sprint weekends that only offer one practice session, you simply can’t afford to be locked into a bad suspension setup with only six laps in qualifying to figure it out.

Meanwhile, Colton Herta is wrestling with his own set of unpredictable variables over in the Formula 2 paddock. The American basically walked away from a highly successful, dialed-in IndyCar career just to scrap for his final superlicense points. He’s gunning for a full-time F1 seat with Cadillac next year—hoping to usurp veterans like Valtteri Bottas or Sergio Pérez—but right now, he’s having a hard time proving he’s the right guy for the job.

Herta is suiting up for Hitech this weekend in Montreal, marking the second Americas-based round added to the F2 calendar after the skipped events in Sakhir and Jeddah. He needs just six points (the equivalent of an 8th place finish) to cross the 40-point threshold. F2 and IndyCar are the only series that dish out a clean 40 points to their champions, though a recent FIA realignment finally bumped up IndyCar’s overall weighting. Herta probably wishes that rule change had dropped sooner. Having finished second in IndyCar in 2024 and seventh in 2025, he was forced into F1’s antechamber to make up the deficit.

Taking a perceived step backward is a massive gamble, but it’s earned him the absolute respect of American racing royalty. Mario Andretti, who has championed Herta’s push at Cadillac, sees it as the ultimate proof of dedication. As Andretti pointed out, drivers can build incredibly lucrative, satisfying careers staying stateside in IndyCar, NASCAR, or IMSA. Giving up that comfort zone takes guts. But calling it a “step back” might be underestimating the F2 shark tank. Herta is finding the European feeder series way more competitive than he bargained for, reigniting the endless debate about how IndyCar machinery actually stacks up against F2. Romain Grosjean, who made the jump from F1 to IndyCar, recently weighed in, suggesting an IndyCar essentially drives like an F2 car—a spec formula with simplified, less sensitive aero.