Lewis Hamilton's brake-failure retirement from the Spanish Grand Prix at Madring in Madrid has left the Ferrari driver 101 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli of Mercedes. Over the last three rounds, at Zandvoort, Monza and Madrid, Antonelli has scored 73 points to Hamilton's 22. Ferrari has opened an investigation, and PlanetF1 reports that the early findings point not to the braking system itself but to an ancillary component in the rear brake circuit.
What happened in Madrid
Hamilton went into Turn 1 side by side with Max Verstappen, who ran off the track. As Verstappen was told to give the place back and then moved ahead again, Hamilton's brakes began to fail. "The pedal went long. We tried to fix it from the pit wall, but a few corners later it happened again," Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur explained. Unable to control the car, Hamilton picked up several track limits violations and was lapped by most of the field before he parked. Vasseur said that, for safety reasons, carrying on "didn't make sense".
Hamilton also clipped the wall with his left rear early in the race. But according to PlanetF1's Thomas Maher, Ferrari's initial investigation found the failure lay not in the brake unit itself but in a component within it, and that it was unrelated to his FP3 crash and the rushed rebuild of the car on Saturday. Asked whether the Turn 1 contact was to blame, Vasseur said: "Honestly, I don't know. They were still looking at the car when I left."
22 points to 73 in three races
| Pos | Driver | Team | Points | Gap to Antonelli |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 292 | - |
| 2 | George Russell | Mercedes | 211 | 81 |
| 3 | Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 191 | 101 |
According to GPFans, Hamilton was second after July's Hungarian GP, 50 points behind Antonelli. The gap has doubled in the three races since, and he has also dropped to third behind Antonelli's team-mate George Russell. Nine rounds remain, including the Singapore sprint, and the most Hamilton can score is 233 points. A comeback is mathematically possible, but GPFans wrote that his title hopes had taken "an almost fatal blow".
Ferrari's upgrade schedule
Ferrari changed aerodynamic parts at Zandvoort and introduced a new-spec power unit at Monza. The next major upgrade is due at the United States GP on 23–25 October, built around a floor revision that takes June's Barcelona package considerably further. Although Hamilton is ahead of team-mate Charles Leclerc in the championship, Ferrari has not named him its number one driver. The first test is how much ground he can recover, brake trouble permitting, in Saturday's race in Baku.