Hamilton’s resignation weekend in São Paulo – Lewis Hamilton might be in the red this year, but not in the way that Ferrari fans expected. After another difficult Saturday, the seven-time champion sounded like a man ready to throw his helmet into the nearest São Paulo bin. In the qualifying duel at Ferrari, Charles Leclerc now leads 16:5, and no one is more aware of that than Hamilton himself.

While Leclerc secured a place in the top three for the third consecutive time, Hamilton failed to make it into the final qualifying shootout. The Briton will start Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix in 13th place, ten places behind his teammate. Judging by his mood after the session, he has already mentally packed for the flight home.

 

Tyres, temperatures, and a touch of despair

Hamilton’s interviews are increasingly sounding like therapy sessions. “The setup was fine. I just couldn’t get the tyres to work,” he sighed, looking every bit the man who’d been betrayed by Pirelli for the hundredth time. When asked what exactly had gone wrong, he offered the world’s least informative diagnosis: “Tyre temperatures.”

When pressed further, Lewis shrugged it off with the cryptic response, ‘It all happens in the garage.’ One could be forgiven for thinking that he was describing an episode of CSI: Maranello rather than a Formula 1 qualifying session.

The Mercedes legend, now sporting the distinctive Ferrari red, conceded that the team had executed the timing and out-laps as planned. The only missing ingredient was heat, specifically in the rear tyres. Apparently, the Brazilian sunshine wasn’t enough to help him.

“I couldn’t get the rears up to temperature,” he explained, as though he’d been trying to bake bread at room temperature.

F1’s 2026 rules predicted to create “overtaking-fest”

 

A sprint without answers

If the 24-lap sprint was supposed to provide clarity, it only confirmed Hamilton’s worst fears. ‘The only thing I learned in the sprint,’ he said grimly, ‘was that you can’t overtake.’ This statement serves as both a tactical observation and a personal eulogy for his hopes of winning the race.

When asked about his mental state after yet another Q2 exit, Hamilton was candid. ‘I’m not doing well at all,’ he confessed, adding: ‘I’ve been trying all year, but somehow it just goes badly every weekend.’ His voice carried the weight of a man who has seen more than his fair share of telemetry graphs.

Nevertheless, in true Lewis fashion, he vowed to try again. ‘Of course I’ll get up tomorrow and try again,’ he said. However, even he couldn’t resist adding, ‘But it will probably be another lost weekend.’ Not quite the Churchillian rallying cry that Ferrari might have hoped for.

Leclerc SLAMS his Ferrari team “not good enough”

 

Meanwhile, Leclerc’s quiet satisfaction

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Ferrari garage, Leclerc wore the smile of a man who’s finally getting things to click. While Hamilton spoke of gloom and tyre trauma, Leclerc sat beside Lando Norris and Kimi Antonelli at the press conference, looking every inch the in-control driver.

‘I don’t want to exaggerate,’ Leclerc began modestly. ‘The improvement we made is only about a tenth, maybe one and a half.’ In F1 terms, that’s the difference between hero and zero — and this weekend, Leclerc was very much the former. ‘A tenth of a second means you’re either out of Q1 or in Q3,’ he explained. For once, Ferrari found itself on the right side of that razor’s edge.

Leclerc credited the team’s precision for the turnaround. ‘We did a really good job implementing everything perfectly from Q1 to Q3,’ he said. ‘It’s been a difficult weekend since free practice. We knew we’d struggle, but we did everything perfectly.” While Hamilton sounded as though he was describing a bad breakup, Leclerc sounded like a man in a happy relationship with his car: cautious, but optimistic.

 

A tale of two garages.

Friday had been a different story, with Leclerc sounding as uncertain as his teammate does now. ‘We’re just slow,’ he admitted, before promising to try a different setup on Saturday. Whatever tweaks Ferrari made overnight worked wonders for one side of the garage. ‘We changed the car a bit this morning,’ he explained. ‘That helped us take a step forward.’

For Leclerc, it was a weekend of small but crucial improvements. For Hamilton, however, it was another round of déjà vu. Fans — and perhaps Lewis himself — won’t have missed the irony of him joining Ferrari to escape Mercedes’ inconsistencies.

As the lights go out in São Paulo, Leclerc will be aiming for a podium finish, while Hamilton will be looking through the chaos of the midfield, hoping for a miracle or a mass safety car event.

Because, at this point, he’s not racing his rivals anymore — he’s racing against time.

And, judging by his own words, Hamilton may already be admitting defeat before Sunday has even begun. ‘I’ve been trying all year, but…’ he said, leaving the sentence unfinished. The unfinished sentence tells the whole story.

Maybe next week, Lewis. Maybe next week…

Vettel changes his mind on 2025 drivers’ F1 champ prediction

 

MORE F1 NEWS – F1’s 2026 rules predicted to create “overtaking-fest”

Much has been written about the massive technical regulation changes coming in 2026 and most of it not positive. Yet on the plus side Mercedes trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, believes the return to flat floors means there is little chance of the porpoising effect which affect the silver arrows so badly.

Next year the floor designs will return to one’s similar than prior to the 2022 regulation change. Gone will be the Venturi channels which create low pressure and suck the cars onto the track, but there will be a substantially large diffuser at the back of the car.

Shovlin argues even were similar issues to the porpoising effect to occur, the teams are much better placed to deal with them quickly. Even so, some teams will trip up in one area or another as the new extreme aerodynamic changes come into force.

 

‘F1 teams will trip up with 2026 designs’

“There’s always going to be traps and there’s always going to be teams that are disappointed with the job they’ve done. You would never walk into a new set of regulations thinking it will be straightforward,” Shovlin explained.

“What you would say is that the regulations move back towards the previous generation of cars where you’re unlikely to get the same issues with the porpoising that affected the start of these regs. Even if there were problems like that, with what we’ve learned in the intervening period with the tools we’ve developed to understand aerodynamics, we’d be in a better place to deal with it.

“There is always the challenge of trying to get a new formula balanced because we can do work in the simulators but really until you start running the car on track you don’t know exactly how it’s going to behave.”

George Russell recently claimed that due to the differences and s[pread in the states. Of battery charge and power unit mapping, drivers may find unusual paces to make their overtakes net year. The energy deployment of the F1 cars will become a large part of there drivers’ workload and whilst it will offer further strategic options, the drivers run the risk of losing the position they’ve made later in the lap as the charge runs down…READ MORE