Lewis Hamilton did not have an especially straightforward race. Beyond losing second place because of the Safety Car pit stop, the Ferrari driver also struggled throughout the opening stint after an incorrect front wing adjustment before the race left him with excessive understeer. As a result, Lewis Hamilton found it difficult to build any rhythm while trying to rebalance the car, spending much of the opening phase attempting to compensate for a setup choice that ultimately worked against him. It was one of those races where small decisions made before the lights went out ended up having a much bigger impact than expected once the Grand Prix was underway.
After concerns ahead of the weekend, with Ferrari’s engineers estimating on Thursday that they could be around six tenths slower than their rivals on the straights, the team’s weekend took a completely unexpected turn, surprising even the drivers themselves. Already on Friday, Lewis Hamilton secured an impressive pole position. More important than the pole itself, however, was the encouraging sight of a Ferrari that looked genuinely competitive from the very first practice sessions.
The SF-26 appeared much more comfortable than anticipated, and for the first time in several races the team looked capable of fighting at the very front on pure pace rather than relying on strategy or unusual circumstances.
Victory did not come for the British driver, either in the Sprint or in the Grand Prix, but the Briton’s weekend still offered several interesting talking points because, curiously, it unfolded in the exact opposite way to that of teammate Charles Leclerc. The Monegasque immediately established an excellent pace in the opening laps, pulled away from the field and forced Andrea Kimi Antonelli into a recovery drive. Charles Leclerc looked comfortable from the very beginning of the race, whereas Lewis Hamilton needed several laps before finding any confidence in the balance of his Ferrari.
After Saturday’s qualifying session, Lewis Hamilton had already explained that he had not been able to recreate the same feeling he enjoyed on Friday and had therefore failed to improve on his Sprint Qualifying lap despite making no major setup changes to the car.
Part of the reason was the changing conditions, as much stronger winds on Saturday inevitably altered the car’s balance. Even relatively small changes in wind direction can have a significant influence on modern Formula 1 cars, particularly through the high-speed corners where aerodynamic balance becomes absolutely crucial.
Those difficulties carried over into Sunday’s race, particularly during the opening stint, when Lewis Hamilton struggled to match his teammate’s pace and eventually found himself around ten seconds behind Charles Leclerc before making his pit stop. There was, however, an interesting reason behind those struggles: some pre-race setup decisions introduced a level of understeer that proved particularly difficult to manage. Rather than allowing Lewis Hamilton to attack confidently on corner entry, the car repeatedly refused to rotate in the way he expected, forcing him to adapt his driving style almost immediately.
After the race, Lewis Hamilton explained that Charles Leclerc had done an excellent job and admitted that all the magic he had felt on Friday had simply disappeared over the course of the weekend. Regarding the balance, the seven-time world champion said he had noticed that Charles Leclerc had increased front downforce compared to qualifying by adding more front wing, while he himself had felt the car was suffering from too much oversteer with the differential settings they were using.
Believing that reducing front wing would help stabilize the rear, Lewis Hamilton went in the opposite direction, only to end up with massive understeer at the start of the race. Although the cars are under parc fermé conditions after qualifying, allowing only very limited setup changes, drivers are still permitted to adjust the angle of the front wing before the race. It is a standard procedure throughout Formula 1 weekends, and the laps completed on the way to the grid are specifically intended to evaluate these adjustments based on track conditions, wind levels and overall grip.
Engineers carefully analyse the drivers’ feedback during those installation laps before making any final front wing changes, knowing that even a few clicks can noticeably alter the handling characteristics of the car.
While Charles Leclerc opted to increase front downforce even further, Lewis Hamilton chose the opposite approach in an attempt to stabilize the rear of the car. By reducing front downforce, he hoped to calm a rear end that had felt too nervous throughout the previous sessions. The decision, however, backfired. From the opening laps, particularly with a full fuel load, the British driver experienced severe understeer, suggesting that he and his engineers had underestimated how much front downforce the car actually needed under those race conditions. The extra fuel only exaggerated the problem, making it even more difficult to rotate the car into slower corners while also reducing confidence in the faster sections of the circuit.
Lewis Hamilton later admitted that the front end was completely missing and acknowledged that they had underestimated the required front wing angle. He added that the responsibility belonged both to himself and to the engineering team, confirming that they had gone in the wrong direction with the final setup choice.
Throughout the opening phase of the first stint, Lewis Hamilton repeatedly complained about understeer, struggling to make the Ferrari rotate not only through slower corners like Turns 3 and 4, where rotation is critical, but also through high-speed sections like Stowe and Copse. For a driver who relies heavily on a responsive front end to maximize corner entry speed, those limitations inevitably translated into lost lap time.
The problem with losing time in fast corners like Copse is that it has a double effect. First, the driver immediately loses lap time through the corner itself because he is unable to carry the desired minimum speed. Second, that lost speed carries all the way into the Maggots, Becketts and Chapel sequence, significantly increasing the overall deficit throughout one of the fastest and most technically demanding sections of the circuit. Once momentum is lost through Copse, recovering that time over the following sequence becomes almost impossible, especially against another Ferrari running with a more balanced setup.
As Pirelli had already highlighted after analysing data from Friday’s long runs and Saturday’s Sprint, excessive understeer simply increases stress on the front tyres. At one stage, Lewis Hamilton even felt the tyres beginning to develop graining, something that inevitably reduced available grip even further. On Saturday after qualifying, Pirelli Motorsport Director Dario Maraffuschi explained that understeer places excessive stress on the front tyres.
Rather than generating more operating temperature, it increases wear and accelerates tyre degradation, meaning there is very little benefit in setting up the car with a balance that naturally tends towards understeer. Instead of protecting the tyres, excessive understeer often produces exactly the opposite effect.
After being overtaken by Andrea Kimi Antonelli while already struggling, Lewis Hamilton worked together with his engineers to adjust the balance using the settings available on the steering wheel. These changes included modifications to the differential and engine braking, as well as adapting his driving approach through several corners around the Silverstone circuit. Those adjustments partially improved the situation, and his lap times gradually began to fall again, occasionally returning to levels similar to those of teammate Charles Leclerc. Even so, the improvement came only after valuable race time had already been lost during the opening laps.
Lewis Hamilton explained that he simply could not make the Ferrari rotate until roughly halfway through the opening stint, when some differential changes finally helped improve the front-end response. By then, however, the gap to Charles Leclerc had already become significant and much more difficult to recover. Lewis Hamilton also admitted that the five seconds lost during the pit stop only made matters worse, after which one problem followed another. Losing additional time in the pit lane eliminated any realistic opportunity of recovering the positions that had already slipped away because of the earlier balance issues.
Even those adjustments were not enough to completely solve the problem. Before Lewis Hamilton’s pit stop, Ferrari instructed him over the radio to add at least four or five clicks of front wing, a clear indication that the balance remained too heavily biased towards the rear despite all the steering wheel adjustments that had been made during the stint. The time lost in the pits and rejoining in traffic only compounded the problem, forcing Lewis Hamilton into lengthy battles with Max Verstappen and George Russell instead of allowing him to focus on chasing the leaders.
Running behind other cars also meant spending several laps in disturbed air, reducing the effectiveness of the front wing even further and making the understeer even more noticeable. Modern Formula 1 cars remain extremely sensitive to turbulent airflow, particularly when following another competitor closely, so the Briton’s recovery was always going to be more complicated once he found himself in the middle of the pack.
Only after completing his pit stop and overtaking Max Verstappen was Lewis Hamilton finally able to run consistently in clean air. His lap times immediately improved and became much more competitive, matching those of teammate Charles Leclerc for extended periods. The Ferrari finally behaved much more predictably, allowing the seven-time world champion to extract considerably more performance than he had managed during the opening stint.
By that stage, however, Charles Leclerc no longer needed to push at full pace, particularly after Andrea Kimi Antonelli encountered his own problems. That naturally makes any direct comparison between the two Ferrari drivers slightly more complicated, because they were no longer racing under exactly the same circumstances. Nevertheless, the contrast between their opening stints remains particularly revealing.
Lewis Hamilton’s race therefore demonstrated just how decisive seemingly minor setup choices can be in modern Formula 1. A simple front wing adjustment, made with the intention of improving rear stability, instead produced excessive understeer that compromised almost the entire first stint. Even though Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari managed to recover part of the lost performance through steering wheel adjustments and later front wing changes, the time already lost could never truly be recovered.
It also highlighted how Charles Leclerc’s decision to move in the opposite direction ultimately proved to be the correct one, allowing the Monegasque to exploit the Ferrari’s full potential from the very beginning while Lewis Hamilton was forced into a long and difficult recovery drive.
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