Mark Hughes: Overheating and enraged – how Ferrari threw another F1 win away

The story around Mexico on race day was of two under-deliveries of performance – one from Ferrari, the other from the newly-crowned world champion Kimi Antonelli. In the straight running of this race, the one where Charles Leclerc didn’t pass Lewis Hamilton on lap 1 by missing out part of the track, Ferrari finishes 1-2. You cannot give Max Verstappen opportunities like that and get away without a spanking.

For Antonelli, he did way more than he needed to in finishing third, still right with Verstappen and Hamilton at the end, but a properly on-form Antonelli would not have been starting the race from the second row in a Mercedes which had the potential to win unopposed from pole.

Here’s how the new world champion himself put it. “I knew after Austin how close I was [to the title] but although I still tried to block that thought, you sort of relax in a certain way, knowing how little you need to achieve that. That’s why in qualifying yesterday I didn’t have the same intensity; I was less precise in my driving, whereas Austin was completely the opposite. I was much more aggressive there, much more present in the moment. While in Mexico I just wasn’t as intense in the way I was driving.”

The team remains in awe of what he put together around COTA last week in an updated Mercedes with a more aggressively forward centre of aero balance that demands a very different way of driving and a combination of unflinching commitment and precision which seemed unreasonable to achieve with the sort of grinding consistency that he managed. He wasn’t at that level in Mexico but if he had been, George Russell’s P2 in qualifying with a time only 0.006sec slower than Hamilton’s pole, despite carrying an extra lap’s worth of fuel, confirmed that pole and victory would have been entirely within Antonelli’s grasp.

Especially so because once you get in front here, it’s very difficult to be beaten. The thin air which overheats the PUs and brakes of the following car ensures that, the thin air which hardly gives any drag reduction from the slipstream, the thin air which makes tyre management extra difficult in the wake of another car.

The air may be thin but there’s a massive benefit here in at least having it clear of disturbance. That’s what Leclerc gifted Verstappen by his over-optimistic move on Hamilton into Turn 4 seconds after the Ferraris had converted 1-3 on the grid to 1-2 on the track. As both Ferraris ran wide, Leclerc missed out Turn 5 to rejoin in the lead, Hamilton was slowed by having to scrabble around Turn 5 from off the track, allowing Verstappen to pounce on his second place. If Leclerc were to give the place back to Hamilton – as per the regulations – he’d now need to allow Verstappen past first. He decided he’d rather take his chances with the penalty – and try to pull out enough of a lead to negate it.

Verstappen, on medium tyres to the softs of the Ferraris, just needed to keep Leclerc in sight and wait for the stewards to confirm what seemed obvious. A furious Hamilton meanwhile just followed the Red Bull as close as he could without overheating everything, as Leclerc got on with pulling out that gap. Which was confirmed as needing to be 5sec on lap 10, by which time Leclerc had it out to half that with plenty of laps to go before the pit stops (this was a single-stop race) came into the radar. “The stewards have just handed Charles this win,” fumed Hamilton, feeling the penalty for passing off track should be 10sec (as had been agreed in a drivers’ meeting).

Well, that would only be the case if Verstappen could not stay within 5sec of the Ferrari by the time of the stops. Actually, he could. Leclerc’s hard-driven softs had given their best by the 21st lap and Verstappen’s mediums were still good. For the next seven laps Verstappen was able to peg Leclerc’s lead to 5sec. They were each brought in on the 28th lap. In addition to the 5sec penalty, Leclerc’s stop was slow, at 3.7sec. Verstappen’s was quick, at 2.3sec. That was all it took to put the Red Bull in the lead. Verstappen was not going to lose it from there, not with the Mexico advantage of clear air.

The Ferraris gave chase, Leclerc closing the gap down, Hamilton (who’d stopped the lap after them) catching them both. But the Ferrari did not like the medium tyre and after about eight laps of chasing in the thin dirty air, they were actually going slower than the now soft-tyred Verstappen.

Meanwhile, Antonelli – who’d been following Hamilton at a respectable distance before the Ferraris stopped – was now in the lead (from the other non-stoppers Russell and Lando Norris). He could feel his soft tyres fading and the lap times were dropping away. But race engineer Bono kept him out there, waiting for a safety car which, if it had appeared between the Ferrari/Verstappen stops and 10 laps later would have sprung him into the lead. By the time it did come (for Valtteri Bottas’ Cadillac, which had crashed after suffering a scary front-left suspension failure as he braked from 200mph). Antonelli had just pitted and was set to drop back to the fourth place he’d run in before the stops.

Hamilton had pitted as soon as the safety car came out, so as to be on fresh tyres with which to attack Leclerc at the restart. In the event, that strategy was neutralised by the safety car being replaced by a red flag. So everyone got to fit fresh rubber for the remaining 24-lap sprint to the finish. It was a standing start – and Hamilton’s getaway from third took him straight past Leclerc before ruthlessly chopping across him, then going for Verstappen’s outside into Turn 1. That predictably led to light contact and Verstappen remaining in front. Leclerc, in desperately trying not to hit Hamilton, had locked up disastrously and on his flat-spotted tyres was picked off by Antonelli.

Leclerc would spend the remainder of the race driving a ruthlessly defensive but fair race to keep Norris behind him. Fourth place for Leclerc didn’t really reflect his central part in the race’s outcome. His raging competitive spirit had cost Ferrari a likely 1-2 and Hamilton wasn’t slow in pointing that out.