There are a lot of things two Ferrari teammates might argue about: strategy calls, garage hierarchy, who gets the better side of the pit wall. Apparently, food is now on that list too.
In a recent Q&A video, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc sat side by side in their matching white Ferrari race suits and answered questions together. When the topic of food came up, Hamilton quickly used this moment to take the mick out the Monegasque.
“You eat really plain food,” he told his teammate. “Like there’s no spices. I feel like you need to come to the Caribbean, man.”
Leclerc’s Defense Actually Makes Sense
Leclerc pushed back with what is, frankly, a reasonable argument: he’s not eating spicy food right before climbing into a Formula 1car. Hamilton’s rebuttal was instant: “It gives you fire.” Both of them laughed.
Hamilton has been vegan since 2017 and has always been vocal about the role food plays in his performance.
Speaking to Men’s Health in 2021, he described discovering foods he never expected to love: falafel, avocado, beetroot, fresh and dried fruit.
The man clearly has opinions about what goes on the plate.
Things have been considerably closer between the two in the 2026 season, with Hamilton looking more settled at Ferrari and having outperformed Leclerc in three of the first five rounds.
After a difficult debut year at Maranello, the two appear to have genuinely settled into something that looks like actual chemistry – which is rare in an F1 garage, and rarer still when one driver spent years as the undisputed team leader before his new teammate showed up.
Hamilton has also admitted to struggling to resist Italian food since joining Ferrari, noting he was “trying to stay off the pizzas and the pasta” before conceding he’d eaten three pizzas in two days. So his nutritional authority here is, at best, provisional. Telling Leclerc to add Caribbean spices after confessing to a pizza binge is a solid negotiating position.
Leclerc’s logic about spicy food pre-race is the kind of practical reasoning that sounds boring until you remember these guys are pulling 5G through corners for two hours straight. He’s probably not wrong. But Hamilton’s “it gives you fire” answer is hard to argue with on pure entertainmentvalue – and at this point, that might be the only metric that matters for a midseason Q&A.
