Belgium was as bad as it gets for Lewis Hamilton’s title hopes. Kimi Antonelli returned to winning ways at Spa, while Hamilton was left to salvage a lonely P4 after clattering into George Russell at the first corner, costing the seven-time world champion the crucial momentum he had built up throughout the first half of the summer and stretching the teenage Italian’s championship advantage out to 45 points.
A gap of that size looks even starker once you run the ever-changing F1 world championship odds through a betting odds calculator, a tool that takes a raw number and reframes it as a broader measure of how commanding a lead actually is. With so few rounds left, that kind of conversion helps put into perspective just how much ground Hamilton now has to make up. Next comes Hungary, then the Netherlands, and finally Monza, home of the Tifosi. But will Hamilton still be alive in the championship battle by the time his new adoring public gets its chance to watch him do his thing?
No race means quite what the Italian Grand Prix means for Ferrari’s supporters, whatever the state of the standings. But considering the fact that there have been just two Scuderia victories in the last 15 years around the famous old track, a potential Hamilton or Charles Leclerc victory won’t be easy to come by. Here are the last three Ferrari victories on home turf.
Charles Leclerc — 2024
Ferrari arrived at Monza in 2024 with a season that had morphed into a genuine free-for-all. Max Verstappen still led the standings after his early-season dominance, but Red Bull’s monstrous advantage over the rest of the grid had evaporated, and Lando Norris’s crushing win at Zandvoort the week before had turned the Dutch Grand Prix into the moment McLaren truly announced themselves as Verstappen’s biggest threat.
Leclerc, meanwhile, had gone quiet since a Monaco win back in May — though podiums either side of the summer break suggested Ferrari’s form was trending the right way. Still, McLaren were the story heading in: Norris and Oscar Piastri locked out the front row, McLaren’s first at Monza since 2012, leaving Leclerc, starting fourth, very much the outsider on home soil.
The race turned into anything but the procession that the grid suggested. Piastri passed Norris at the Roggia chicane on the opening lap, and Leclerc slipped through as the two McLarens tangled with each other. Ferrari gambled from there — while Piastri, Norris and the rest of the front-runners committed to two stops, Leclerc’s Ferrari nursed a one-stop strategy all the way to the flag. Piastri closed at a rate of knots in the closing laps, and the Tifosi roared louder with every one that ticked by, but Leclerc held on, crossing the line 2.664 seconds clear.
Charles Leclerc — 2019
Hamilton and Mercedes were cruising toward a sixth consecutive double back in 2019, and the real intrigue that year was all at Ferrari, where a youngster in his first season at Maranello was quietly dismantling the established order. Leclerc had out-qualified Sebastian Vettel seven races running, and seven days before Monza he’d taken his maiden win at Spa, in an emotionally charged weekend overshadowed by the death of F2 driver Anthoine Hubert. He arrived a genuine favourite, having claimed a chaotic pole, with five-time Monza winner Hamilton second and his Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas third.
Vettel’s race unravelled almost immediately — he spun unassisted at the Ascari chicane on lap four, rejoined into Lance Stroll, and picked up a stop-go penalty for his trouble, leaving Leclerc to fight Mercedes alone. Hamilton pressured hard, twice getting close enough to have a real go, only to be firmly rebuffed at Turn 1 and then again at the Roggia chicane. When Hamilton’s tyres started to fade, Bottas took up the chase on fresher rubber, closing rapidly — but he simply ran out of time. Leclerc held on to win by just 0.835 seconds.
Fernando Alonso — 2010
Alonso’s first season at Ferrari had built into one of the most chaotic title fights in years. Five drivers — Alonso, Hamilton, Mark Webber, Vettel, and, more loosely, Jenson Button — held realistic championship claims heading into the final third of the season, a mess made messier by the fallout from Ferrari’s controversial team-order victory for Alonso in Germany two races earlier.
Alonso sat third in the standings and badly needed a big result on Ferrari’s home soil. Nobody could call a clear favourite going in — Alonso claimed a superb pole, but Button’s McLaren and Red Bull’s raw pace made Vettel and Webber threats too.
Button snatched the lead off the line, and the two title-adjacent cars ran nose to tail early on, Alonso even nudging his own team-mate Felipe Massa’s bumper at the first chicane. The race was effectively decided in the pits: a scorching 3.4-second Ferrari stop allowed Alonso to leapfrog Button, and from there he controlled things to the flag, with Massa completing a Ferrari one-two behind him. Hamilton, the championship leader coming in, crashed out on the opening lap after clipping Massa, badly damaging his own title bid in the process.
It proved Alonso’s third win of five that season — he added Singapore and Korea — and he arrived in Abu Dhabi as the favourite to claim a first Scuderia title in four years. Ferrari’s decision to pit him into traffic behind Vitaly Petrov cost him the title by four points, with Vettel snatching his maiden crown instead. The result still haunts both Alonso and Ferrari fans to this day.
Leave a Reply