Hamilton, Ferrari and the complications of second-guessing F1 calls

Lewis Hamilton‘s Singapore Grand Prix was undone by a decision that inevitably raised, not for the first time this year, some uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Ferrari.

On lap 39 at Marina Bay, a virtual safety car handed the Maranello squad a cheap pitstop with its cars running second and third. Charles Leclerc took it and finished second behind Max Verstappen. Hamilton didn’t, and by the chequered flag he had dropped to a distant sixth, passed in the closing laps by Kimi Antonelli, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

Team boss Fred Vasseur left little doubt about what the pitwall wanted from its drivers: “It was crystal clear on the radio,” he told Sky Sports F1 after the race, adding that stopping both cars would have kept Ferrari in P2 and P3.

On the cooldown lap, Hamilton took the blame outright: “My call, and I lost us valuable points,” although his own account differed slightly later on, posting a statement on Instagram saying that he had missed the pit entry, and that he then “decided to stay out and try to hold track position”.

The obvious reading of the situation is another example of a loss of trust, a driver who has stopped believing his pitwall will get the decision right and starts making the decisions himself.

A significant part of the 2026 season supports the theory, but the previous weekend adds a complication, because he did the same thing in Malaysia, and it appeared to work out.

At Sepang, Ferrari put both cars on slick tyres on a wet track. Hamilton has said he wanted intermediates and was persuaded otherwise, in a long wait on the grid where the team debated the call. By lap five, the gamble looked hopeless, and the pitwall tried to bring him in for intermediates.

He refused on the radio, saying, “I want to stay out, we made a gamble.”

There was a case for staying out: By lap eight the slicks were matching the intermediates, and Hamilton went on to recover from 15th to finish third. The result, however, flattered the decision: safety cars did much of the work, including a late one that let him switch back to softs.

Afterwards, he said the team’s call “wasn’t good enough” but defended the decision by saying it had been made collectively rather than by one person, and that Ferrari had held a long internal discussion about it.

Hamilton hasn’t given up on his team, but that was the language of a driver who believes the process is still flawed, and who left Sepang with a podium that seemed to confirm his own instinct to persevere through a difficult situation, whatever the safety cars contributed.

That is what made the Singapore case interesting: at Marina Bay, his decision to stay out when the team wanted him to pit cost him a strong result.

A call that should have been straightforward

Hamilton started the Singapore Grand Prix third, behind team-mate Leclerc and pole-sitter Max Verstappen. Ferrari had looked competitive throughout the weekend, finishing second and third in the sprint and qualifying in the same positions for Sunday’s race.

The opening stint proved more difficult for Hamilton than for Leclerc, who had started on soft tyres. Hamilton’s medium tyres didn’t perform as he expected, forcing him to stop on lap 18 – earlier than any other driver – and switch to softs. That left the two Ferraris on different strategies, with the possibility of a further stop still to be decided.

The crucial moment came on lap 39, when Lance Stroll‘s retirement prompted a virtual safety car. Ferrari called both cars into the pits, giving them the chance to have a cheap pitstop. Leclerc took the opportunity, but Hamilton decided to stay out.

The Briton explained his thinking in an Instagram post after the race.

“At a track that’s difficult to overtake, you need to try something different and I chose to start on a new medium tyre, to go long and try to make a one-stop work. Unfortunately the medium didn’t perform as well as the soft.”

He added that his pace had returned during the second stint, but he had been unable to make the progress he needed. When the VSC came, he acknowledged Ferrari called him in, saying that he hadn’t simply rejected that instruction but that he missed the pit entry.

“After that, I decided to stay out and try to hold track position to the end but in the closing laps, I was struggling massively with tyre degradation and lost three places, finishing P6, which doesn’t reflect the pace we had in the car today.”

The logic was understandable in principle. Overtaking is very difficult around Marina Bay, and Hamilton was trying to make a one-stop strategy work. But his tyres had already completed 21 laps, and the prospect of making them last to the flag was highly unrealistic.

Leclerc, on fresher rubber, caught and passed his team-mate. Then Antonelli and Norris got by before even Piastri – who had made an extra pitstop – passed Hamilton on the final lap. Sixth was a disappointing end to a race in which he had looked capable of putting Verstappen under pressure.

Hamilton was unequivocal about his responsibility. “A painful lesson today, but I take full responsibility for the decisions I made,” he wrote. “Not every call will work out, and I can accept getting it wrong but I’m sorry to the team for the points we lost today.”

When confidence becomes a liability

It would be too simplistic to attribute Hamilton’s decision entirely to a lack of trust. His account makes clear that he was attempting to protect track position, not simply reject Ferrari’s judgement. There is no definitive evidence that distrust was the reason he chose to stay out.

Nevertheless, the incident provides a revealing snapshot of the relationship between driver and team.

Hamilton’s two seasons at Ferrari have been marked by the difficulty of adapting to a new environment after more than a decade at Mercedes. He has had to learn different systems, work with new engineers and adjust to a team whose methods are not always aligned with his instincts. There have been several moments when he has expressed frustration with decisions from the pitwall and others during which the radio exchanges have appeared baffling.

Drivers like Hamilton often have another perspective that’s not just based on the data the team is seeing: they feel the grip beneath them, understand how the car is behaving and know what they are being asked to achieve on track. The best results usually come when those two sources of information complement each other.

But if a driver begins to believe that his own judgement is more reliable than the team’s, that relationship becomes harder to sustain.

Even a reasonable instruction can become a point of disagreement, and the time available to debate it is often measured in seconds lost, as has been more than once this year as either Ferrari driver has urged to be prioritised, including last weekend, when Hamilton repeatedly asked Ferrari to order Leclerc to let him through.

Ferrari is not entirely blameless

Ferrari should not emerge from the Sepang and Singapore episodes without scrutiny. Its initial tyre choice at Sepang was a significant gamble, and Hamilton’s podium should not obscure the fact that the team had made life unnecessarily difficult for both drivers.

The subsequent recovery softened the criticism, but it did not erase the mistake, as Hamilton himself pointed out.

In Singapore, however, Ferrari’s proposed strategy had a very reasonable prospect of success. The team wanted both cars to stop under the VSC, and Leclerc’s second place confirmed the value of the approach.

The instruction was given, but the decision to stay out was ultimately Hamilton’s. The result underlined the difficulty of managing a race when the driver and pitwall don’t arrive at the same conclusion.

It doesn’t mean Ferrari’s strategy should be beyond question. The team has to create an environment in which its drivers have confidence in the information they receive and the decisions being made on their behalf, something that, judging by some of the examples seen across the season, Hamilton still wants improved.

If that confidence is missing, simply issuing clearer instructions won’t necessarily resolve the underlying problem.

But the reverse is also true. Ferrari can’t reasonably be held responsible for every decision its drivers make, particularly when Hamilton himself acknowledges that he chose to stay out and that the decision cost valuable points.

The question is whether both sides can learn from the episode without allowing it to become another source of friction.

Hamilton’s contrasting experiences in Sepang and Singapore illustrate the danger. The first race rewarded his willingness to persevere through a difficult strategy; the second punished his decision to gamble on preserving track position.

But one successful gamble doesn’t make the next a good decision, just as a poor strategy call doesn’t mean a team will always get it wrong.

What it all costs

Ferrari has made significant number of strategic misjudgments this year, which have given Hamilton a rational basis for second-guessing the pitwall, and Singapore showed what happens when he does it on a day the pitwall was right.