Lewis Hamilton’s 400th Race: Two Calls He Made Himself, and the Information Ferrari Never Gave Him
He started 20th after a 75-place penalty, gained 11 places on the first lap, and made both of the race's big calls himself. One worked. The other dropped him to ninth.
The rain came back with ten laps to go, and Lewis Hamilton was on the wrong tyres for it. He was running eighth at Interlagos, behind Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls car, when Ferrari called him in for intermediates. He stayed out. Lawson went in. His team-mate Charles Leclerc, just behind him, went in. Hamilton kept going on the slicks, caught the wet patch at the top of the hill out of Turn 12, and spun, the rear of the Ferrari glancing the barrier as he fought it back to the pit lane. He finished ninth, a lap down, on his 400th Grand Prix start, and the spin was the second of two decisions he had made for himself that afternoon.
The last information Hamilton got was that the rain would stay the same. “The last bit of information I got was that the rain was going to stay the same, and in those conditions my grip was feeling pretty good,” he said afterwards. “They didn’t say it’s raining more in the first half of the lap. If I’d have known that I would have come in.” He added: “As soon as I got to Turn 1, I realised it was wet. So, it just lacked a little bit of information there. And ultimately, that’s on me.” He had been told the conditions would not get worse, and he went a lap longer on the slicks than everyone around him. The call to stay out was his: he did the opposite of the car in front of him, and the car behind him did what the wall asked.
By lap 14 Hamilton had dropped to 14th, his rear intermediates ballooning and overheating on the drying track, and he was asking for slicks while Ferrari wanted to wait. The switch came after some back-and-forth over the radio, after persistent requests, and he was the first driver to make it. The field followed him in. By lap 29 he was back in ninth. Later in the race he took a second set of softs, set fastest laps while stuck behind the race leader, and unlapped himself from Lando Norris on lap 44.
Ferrari had planned a ten-place grid drop for a new engine. The new engine failed in final practice, vibrating and pouring smoke, and the whole power unit came out: a sixth engine, a fifth turbocharger, a fifth exhaust set, a fourth energy store, a fourth set of control electronics, a fourth motor generator unit and a seventh ancillary component. Sixty-five more places, 75 in total. The regulations flatten any drop over 15 places, so the order at the back was set by qualifying: Hamilton had qualified 11th, so he started 20th, ahead of Max Verstappen’s 30 places. He used qualifying as a test for the replacement engine. Then he gained 11 places before the first lap ended, and gave one back to Ollie Bearman after the stewards investigated his pass at the exit of Turn 5.
Seven days earlier in Mexico, Hamilton had taken his first pole for Ferrari, the 105th of his career, by nine thousandths of a second from George Russell, his first pole since Hungary 2023. In the race, a first-lap clash with Leclerc cost him victory and Ferrari a one-two, Verstappen won, and Kimi Antonelli became the youngest world champion. Hamilton called Leclerc’s approach a mentality problem, said he would never be silenced and would not apologise, and was still frustrated when he arrived in Brazil. On Thursday in São Paulo the two sat down. “Fred has not cleared the air. It was me and Charles. We sat and spoke, we squashed it,” Hamilton said. By Saturday he had told Sky the pair had squashed it.
“He didn’t miss it, they told him too late and he said it was too dangerous to brake that late,” virtual.f1 wrote on Threads. “He was told when he was almost passing like how does that work…lando knew way before it was rainin,” muthonikangaara wrote on the same post. On Facebook, Danny Howard asked the question Ferrari’s own report never answers: “Why hamilton didnt pit for wets when he was infront of Charles?” Zac Ward counted the cost twice: “Ferrari cost Lewis 2 times. First stop Lewis was asking for slicks 2 laps before they pitted him then leaving him out a extra lap at the end instead of double boxing.” Not everyone reads it that way. “Most overrated driver,” bb62b wrote under Formula 1’s own post of the spin. Leclerc’s version sits on the other side from Hamilton’s: “Our execution was good today, we just didn’t have the pace in these conditions.”
He leaves Brazil fourth in the championship, one point behind Russell and 18 behind Verstappen, with Antonelli already champion on 390 points. The fight for second is three drivers in 18 points with three rounds left. Mercedes clinched the constructors’ title at the race where the driver who won six of their titles finished ninth in a Ferrari. They needed only three points more than Ferrari and got 16. Vasseur congratulated them in Ferrari’s own report, and Russell and Antonelli did the job while Hamilton scored two points.
It was Ferrari’s lowest-scoring weekend since the Italian Grand Prix, and even the score is in dispute. Ferrari’s own report, published on Sunday night, still credits Leclerc with seventh and the team with eight points. The FIA’s points document has Leclerc on 249, four more than he arrived with, after the five-second penalty for the Lawson contact moved him to eighth. Ferrari leaves Brazil on 510, 142 behind Mercedes.
