Lewis Hamilton 'stop' plea issued as Ferrari F1 chief spells out situation

Ferrari team principal has asked people to "stop" questioning and his performance on a race-by-race basis. His plea came after the Brit's best Grand Prix result with the team, a fourth-placed finish .

And what a place for Hamilton to finally find some comfort behind the wheel of a red racing machine. It was his first race in Italy as a driver and so there were as he made up eight places from 12th on the grid.

But that result does not mask a difficult start to life as a Ferrari driver. Hamilton rose one place in the drivers' championship to sixth and, after just seven rounds, any talk of the 40-year-old being involved in the title conversation has already vanished.

Just two top-five Grand Prix finishes have raised questions over whether he might ever bid for such glory again. But his boss Vasseur is keen to stamp out any overreactions to his drivers' results as they come in.

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He said: "I think we have to stop with this. Every single driver is working on himself, working with the team, trying to develop something, trying to do a better job.

"It's not that the Saturday evening he's not well prepared, not in good condition with the car, and Sunday he's a magician and everything is perfect. We just have to stay calm. For sure, we need to improve the communication, the understanding of the process and the tools and the software and everything.

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"But honestly he did a very good job in China [where Hamilton won the Sprint race before being disqualified from the main event because his Ferrari failed post-race technical checks], he did a very good job today, step by step we will be there."

Vasseur's comments referred to how Hamilton has often made things harder for himself with underwhelming qualifying results. That was the case at Imola, where the Brit felt a push for the podium might have been on if he had not suffered a disappointing Q2 exit along with team-mate .

Hamilton said: "We have just got to unlock the potential in qualifying. If we had qualified better, we would have been fighting for a podium. I've got some ideas that I'm going to try and apply next week [in Monaco].

"People have been a little bit reluctant to do it, because we've had lots of other things to focus on, but I'm hoping next week we can find something to unlock some more performance. Our car is generally good at high speed, okay in medium, and not as strong as others in low. Obviously, the next race [in Monaco] is all low, so we'll see how we get on."