Lewis Hamilton's Frustration at Ferrari's Late Support

Lewis Hamilton cut a resigned figure as he walked out of Monza on Sunday night, convinced Ferrari have left it far too late to throw their weight behind his championship bid.

The seven-time world champion arrived at the Italian Grand Prix level on points with George Russell in the fight for second in the standings. He left with sixth place, a bruised afternoon, and a blunt assessment of Ferrari’s timing.

“I think from today, we’ve just lost so much ground to [Mercedes] on points,” Hamilton said. “It’s far too late for those decisions to come. It’s too late. All I can do is just try and turn up. I’ll get up tomorrow morning and I’ll give it my best.”

Chaos at Turn One

The tone of Hamilton’s race was set within seconds.

Starting fourth, he launched well and went wheel-to-wheel with Charles Leclerc into the first chicane. At the exit, Leclerc squeezed him onto the grass, Hamilton bounced over the kerb, and the Ferrari dropped like a stone down the order. From a front-row fight to 10th place before the lap was done.

Leclerc’s race unravelled even faster. Pushing hard to recover, he crashed heavily at the Parabolica on lap two, a high-speed off that triggered a red flag and left Hamilton as Ferrari’s only realistic hope of salvaging a podium at their home race.

The opportunity never really materialised.

When the race restarted, Hamilton could not live with the pace of the Mercedes pair or title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Mercedes locked out a dominant one-two at Monza, Antonelli won again, and Hamilton’s deficit in the championship ballooned.

The 41-year-old now trails Russell by 10 points and sits a daunting 76 behind Antonelli.

“It’s never over until it’s over,” Hamilton said. “I don’t know how many points it is now, but I’m sure it’s 60, 70. It’s an amount that, with the pace that they have, it’s a very, very difficult amount to close out.”

Old Questions, Sharper Edges

Ferrari had already been under scrutiny for how they manage their two star drivers.

At Zandvoort last month, Hamilton – on fresher tyres and clearly quicker – felt the team waited too long to move Leclerc aside, with the Monegasque on a different strategy in third place. By the time Ferrari pitted Leclerc and released Hamilton, the chance to attack for the podium had largely gone.

“Great way of wasting time, good job,” Hamilton snapped over team radio that day, before later apologising for the outburst. The frustration, though, was clear.

Monza only hardened his stance. This time, it wasn’t about strategy delays; it was about survival at Turn One.

Speaking after his crash, Leclerc admitted the opening-lap fight had been on the edge.

“It was way too close into turn one,” he said, adding he wasn’t sure if there had been contact. “I was quite a lot on the inside kerb and tried to make the corner, which I didn’t do it tight enough. And then I only saw in the mirrors what happened, which is never what you want between two cars of the same team.”

Hamilton’s view was sharper.

“I was ahead in turn two by the ethics, I was ahead,” he said. “There was no ‘we’ in it.”

The remark cut through the usual diplomatic noise. This wasn’t a driver simply ruing bad luck; it was a statement about how he feels the intra-team battle is being handled.

“I Don’t Race Dirty”

Asked if Ferrari fans should fear a full-blown feud between their two drivers, Hamilton drew a clear line around his own conduct.

“Look, I don’t race dirty,” he said. “I’ve always raced clean and fairly and always left space. So I don’t think they should be worried about me.

“I’ve come into the team and tried to be respectful of space and definitely not put the team in jeopardy. I stand by that and that’s all I can talk about.”

The subtext was obvious: if there is a problem, Hamilton does not believe it lies on his side of the garage.

Team principal Frederic Vasseur did not try to sugar-coat the first-lap clash.

“Not good,” was his verdict on the incident between his two drivers. Yet he also pointed out that every front-running team faces internal tension when both cars are fighting for the same piece of tarmac and the same points.

Vasseur pushed back on the idea that Ferrari should already have imposed clear team orders, pointing to last season as a cautionary tale.

He referenced how Oscar Piastri led McLaren at a similar stage last year; had McLaren thrown everything behind him, Max Verstappen would still have cruised to the title. His message was simple: commit too early to one driver, and you risk backing the wrong horse without changing the outcome.

“For sure, at one stage you have to make a decision,” Vasseur said, “but I think it was too early to make a decision before Monza. Now we have time to discuss with the guys.”

Time Running Out

Hamilton, though, believes Ferrari’s problem runs deeper than just who gets priority on a given Sunday. For him, it’s about the way decisions are made and how quickly the team reacts.

“If we continue to travel the same path, we get the same result,” he said. “And it’s like we keep getting the same result. We’ve got to change things because it’s not helping us to move forward. I think they’re receptive to it and we’ll take it offline.”

That last line matters. Ferrari and Hamilton will talk, away from the microphones, about how to stop days like Monza from becoming a pattern.

The numbers say the title is slipping away. The mood in the paddock suggests Hamilton knows it. The question now is not whether Ferrari back him too late in this fight, but whether they can change quickly enough to avoid the same regrets next season.