'Devastating' Monza was really just a reality check for Ferrari

Lewis Hamilton arrived at Monza on Thursday behind the wheel of a Ferrari F40 he’d spent months tracking down and restoring, stepping out in a tailored suit and overcoat as the paddock briefly ground to a halt to watch.

It fitted the mood he was in. This was a race he’d built up in his head for weeks. “Coming into this weekend, I’ve really been thinking about the sheer magnitude of this grand prix,” he said. “If I was to win, you go into new territory — winning in Monza for the first time with Ferrari is something … it would be phenomenal.”

Four days later, he was calling for Ferrari to write down “rules of engagement” between its two drivers, and describing the weekend as “a bit devastating”.

It was a fair request – Formula 1 has plenty of precedent for that kind of protocol, and Hamilton had exactly this at Mercedes throughout his time alongside Nico Rosberg and later George Russell, even though it wasn’t always respected.

However, the context in which Hamilton made the demand at Monza reveals something more damning about Ferrari than a lack of racing protocol ever could.

Hamilton arrived at Monza 59 points behind Kimi Antonelli‘s championship lead and left 76 points adrift of the Italian driver with 10 rounds left.

The seven-time champion has won one race this year and hasn’t been on the podium since the British Grand Prix two months ago.

It’s true Ferrari‘s second ADUO engine upgrade had given the Maranello squad hope that it would take a step forward that would allow Hamilton to fight for victories more regularly.

But, if anything, Ferrari looked even further from the pace at Monza, with Hamilton coming home in sixth place behind two Mercedes, two McLarens and one Red Bull.

The difficult reality of the situation was that Hamilton was never going to be troubling the front regardless of what happened on the opening lap at Monza. Neither was Charles Leclerc.

“I think today we just lost so much ground to them on points, and it’s far too late for those decisions to come,” Hamilton said afterwards.

Despite Hamilton talking up his own title chances throughout the year, Ferrari’s realistic ambitions this season have been, for the most part, about finishing best of the rest, not about troubling Mercedes or Antonelli.

Monza’s self-inflicted, entirely avoidable clash between its own two cars will sting at Maranello, and it’s not the first time this season that either Hamilton or Leclerc have been unhappy with the lack of decisiveness from Ferrari’s pitwall, Zandvoort two weeks ago being just another example of that.

More worrying for Ferrari, however, was its lack of overall pace and yet another strategic call that backfired and cost Hamilton more points.

You could write off the incident at the Variante del Rettifilo as one of those things: two team-mates going for the same piece of road, a case of hard racing leading to an incident.

Leclerc’s own explanation afterwards leaned that way, telling reporters, “we went too far, I think.”

Hamilton wasn’t having it.

He had started the lap fourth and was 10th by the end of it, forced wide and into the gravel.

“I was ahead into Turn 2. By the apex I was ahead, so there’s no ‘we’ in it,” he said in a pointed rejection of any shared blame.

Whichever version the team accepts, the collision cost Ferrari track position it could not afford to give up in a race where it needed every scrap of pace it had.

However, what happened later was perhaps the more instructive failure. When the virtual safety car came out for Lance Stroll‘s retirement, Antonelli and Max Verstappen both grabbed a cut-price pitstop and used it to storm back through the field to take first and third places.

Hamilton’s team didn’t take the same view of it, and the Briton finished the race on tyres well past their best, over 24 seconds off the lead.

Some of that was bad luck stacked on top of the earlier misfortune: the window would have been marginal even with clean track position, since the VSC period ended only moments after the two front-runners emerged from the pits.

But marginal isn’t the same as unavoidable, and there’s a reasonable case that Ferrari could have used the earlier red flag — triggered by Leclerc’s second-lap crash — to put Hamilton on a harder tyre and buy itself some insurance. But it didn’t, and it meant Hamilton spent 50 laps on a set of mediums.

None of this is a new pattern for Ferrari this year, and its fans have seen different versions of it earlier in the season: a team that hesitates at the moment a clear call is needed, then pays for the consequences after the fact.

A similar thing happened at least in Australia, Austria, Hungary and Zandvoort, but the stakes at Monza were higher because it played out in front of the tifosi, who had to find consolation in celebrating Antonelli’s win amid Ferrari’s massively underwhelming weekend.

Somewhat ironically, Mercedes also had its own intra-team problems when Antonelli’s race was nearly undone after going off when fighting George Russell near the end.

The difference is not that Mercedes managed its drivers better, but that the incident was just a blip in an otherwise dominant weekend.

Ferrari, in contrast, was not only missing the rules of engagement that Hamilton so clearly wants, but also lacked the speed and the strategic clarity, the two main factors that are turning Maranello’s promising 2026 into a disappointment.

Hamilton’s frustration wasn’t really about Leclerc. Pushed on whether there’s a deeper cultural issue at Ferrari, he pulled back from saying so directly – he said he didn’t want to get into a fight about his own team in public. But the shape of his complaint told its own story anyway: no protocol, no clarity, decisions arriving too late to matter.