Where Hamilton is suffering compared to Leclerc as Ferrari’s braking bites

If there were any day for bad sporting news to slip out of sight in Italy, it was the morning after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, when the announcement came that Pope Francis had passed away in the early hours. Members of the Ferrari team flying back to Maranello after a pitilessly exhausting triple-header of grands prix could be forgiven for feeling some quiet relief that, for now, events in Rome are consuming all the oxygen of publicity.

While the teeth of the Italian media aren’t clamped around its ankles for now, Ferrari faces two separate-but-connected challenges: a car which is almost but not quite there, and a star driver seemingly on the edge of an existential crisis over his apparent inability to extract such performance as resides within it.

Charles Leclerc lamented his SF-25’s pace after qualifying on Saturday, since his fourth-place grid spot was nearly four tenths off the pole-position time; on Sunday he was happier after finishing third, but opined that he had “maximised” the car in doing so, and that what’s needed now is a way to unlock more one-lap pace. Still, at least Leclerc saw his glass as half full – whereas Lewis Hamilton, poached a great expense from Mercedes in a roar of publicity, was very much staring at the dregs in the bottom.

The post-race media ‘pen’ is always a good barometer of a driver’s mood as first they do the rounds of various TV broadcasters, then present themselves to the veritable phalanx of porcupine quills that is the collection of phones and voice recorders held forth by the scribblers. After pretty much every grand prix this year – and quite a few last season, it must be said – Hamilton has arrived here seemingly at maximum deflation.

In Jeddah, having just told Sky Sports F1 that he needed “a brain transplant” to understand his car, he arrived before the written press and was asked what positives he could draw from the day. His reply was unequivocal: “Zero.”

Hamilton had started seventh, three places behind his team-mate but over four tenths of a second slower, and finished seventh, half a minute off Leclerc.

“It was horrible,” he said. “Horrible. Not enjoyable at all. I was just sliding around. First stint, massive understeer, car not turning. And then massive deg. And then the second stint, slightly better balance but still just no pace. Yeah, pretty bad.”

Not for the first time this year, Hamilton cut a frustrated figure after the Saudi Arabian GP

Photo by: Peter Fox - Getty Images

Hamilton has always worn his heart on his sleeve and it is not difficult to divine just how difficult his day has been in junctures such as this, where the terse answers, muttered sotto voce, accompany sloop-shouldered and defensive body language. Elite sportspeople carry an almost unassailable self-confidence and yet this quality in Hamilton seems under siege, manifest in the answers he reaches for to reconcile himself to the ugly but undeniable reality of the results.

Sometimes when he has floated the possibility that the car is somehow to blame, that his equipment is somehow unequal (as with the 2016 championship run-in where he was dogged by mechanical unreliability, last year was he was being outqualified by his team-mate, and on occasions this season too), you feel he is trying to convince himself of this as much as anyone else listening.

At other points he has been excoriatingly self-critical, such as this weekend, where he said he "doesn't have an answer" for why he was so strong in the Shanghai sprint race but embattled everywhere else.

The GPS data shows Hamilton was faster than his team-mate over the second half of the start/finish straight, and the short section between the Turns 1/2 and 4/5 – but from there it was almost all about Leclerc

"I’m struggling to feel the car underneath me," he said. "But there's no particular thing. There's nothing to say, 'Hey, this is the issue.' He [Leclerc] has been driving this car for a long time, so he definitely knows it really well. There's plenty in the data, for sure. I mean, honestly, like, it doesn't look massively different in the data. Just... I go slower through the corners. At the moment there's no fix. So... this is how it's going to be for the rest of the year. It's going to be painful."

In Jeddah Hamilton was on the cusp of being knocked out in Q2 and had to do another push lap on fresh softs to be sure of getting through. Interestingly, the margin between his Q2 laps and Leclerc’s was smaller and relatively consistent – around two tenths each time – than in their single Q3 laps. Here, Leclerc continued his broadly linear improvement in lap time whereas Hamilton went slightly slower than his final Q2 lap. And it was in the first sector where the majority of the damage was done.

The GPS data shows Hamilton was faster than his team-mate over the second half of the start/finish straight, and the short section between the Turns 1/2 and 4/5 – but, while the balance of speed had swung between them up until that point, from there it was almost all about Leclerc.

Hamilton got off the throttle and braked earlier for Turn 1, losing ground, then again at the entry to Turn 4. He feathered the throttle more at Turn 9 and was 0.256s down by the beginning of the second sector, mid-way along the short straight between Turns 12 and 13. At that relatively slow left-hander he came off the throttle earlier and more sharply than Leclerc, braking slightly later, but was travelling 11kmh slower at the apex, resulting in another spike in the delta between the two Ferraris.

Hamilton's feel for Ferrari's braking is where he is losing most time compared to Leclerc

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

At the next big braking point, Turn 16, he was again earlier off the throttle and on the brake, longer off the throttle, then was a bit too aggressive on the gas out of Turn 17 and had to feather for longer than Leclerc at this point. Here the margin grew to 0.443s.

At Turn 22 Hamilton came off the throttle earlier but less steeply, carrying a little more speed through, but this came with the penalty of him being longer on the brakes and having to be more cautious picking up the gas again. Thus the delta, which had diminished to 0.328s, began to open out again, reaching a peak of 0.607s at the apex of the final corner, where Hamilton was fractionally earlier on the brakes but later off the throttle, then later off the brakes and on the throttle again, resulting in a speed differential peaking at 9kmh at the apex.

These are small margins but it points to a difference in confidence levels at those points on the circuit where heavy braking is required – and, perhaps more significantly, a significant difference in the way each driver blends from throttle to brake.

From his earliest tests in older Ferraris, Hamilton has remarked on the very different engine-braking characteristics of the Ferrari PU compared with the Mercedes ones to which he had grown accustomed over the preceding 12 seasons. This might seem like an abstruse and recherche point on which to alight, but it is hugely significant.

In a light and downforce-endowed single-seater, just lifting off the throttle at speed gives a decelerative force akin to standing on the brakes in a high-performance road car hard enough to lock the front wheels. The progression of the engine’s braking force is therefore bound up with the wider picture of other influences on braking ‘feel’ – disc and pad materials, and the brake-by-wire system which aims to smooth out the effects of the MGU-K harvesting energy from the rear axle.

The Ferrari 066/15 PU’s engine braking is understood to be ‘lumpier’ than its Mercedes equivalent, inducing understeer which then forces Hamilton to steer more sharply and be later on the throttle. Chasing lap time after these setbacks would account for the greater tyre degradation he has been suffering relative to his team-mate – in Jeddah, Leclerc was able to make his mediums last six laps longer, despite spending the first 19 laps or so in the dirty air of George Russell’s Mercedes. Hamilton was similarly bottled up behind Andrea Kimi Antonelli early on but seemed to get no benefit once in clearer air.

Leclerc's Ferrari experience gives him an advantage that Hamilton expects to last for the rest of the year

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Leclerc has admitted he has had to adopt a relatively “extreme” set-up to find performance in his SF-25 and that on qualifying laps he is never far from the wall. But he has those years of ‘muscle memory’ with the Ferrari PU’s engine-braking characteristics.

So while Leclerc is now telling the team in public that the car is maxed out performance-wise and needs development to make it faster and less edgy, Hamilton is stuck in a rut. PU specs are frozen, hence his remark that “this is how it’s going to be for the rest of the year”.

With new regulations coming for 2026, Hamilton will have a voice on PU development. But for now he’s going to have to adapt – or have 19 more miserable weekends this season.

Can Hamilton find a breakthrough in time for Miami?

Photo by: Peter Fox - Getty Images