Hamilton shows fight, but his Ferrari doesn't pack a punch

The Miami Grand Prix delivered on multiple fronts and provided one of those great race weekends where there are a number of talking points to hone in on.

A big one that need not overshadow its root cause relates to a team that was nowhere near a podium finish on Sunday.

Lewis Hamilton’s radio messages became a highlight of the second half of the race, as he called on Ferrari to swap positions between himself and Charles Leclerc, with the latter on hard tires compared to the mediums Hamilton was running.

As Ferrari tried to work out the best thing to do with its drivers — with Carlos Sainz within 2s behind, but Kimi Antonelli potentially a gettable 5s ahead — Hamilton complained when he was initially told to hold position. Once the team told him that it would make the swap, Hamilton sarcastically replied, “Yeah, have a tea break while you’re at it! Come on…”

There was a later tongue-in-cheek message joking whether he should let Sainz through, too, after returning the position to Leclerc, as Hamilton appeared frustrated at the time it was taking for Ferrari to make decisions.

“It wasn’t even anger,” Hamilton said of his messages. “It wasn’t like ‘effing’ and ‘blinding’ and anything like that. It’s like, ‘Make a decision! You’re sitting there on the chair, you’ve got the stuff in front of you; make the decision quick.’ That’s how I was. I was me; we’re in a panic, we’re trying to keep the car on the track, we’re computing things fast.

“Jeez, I mean, it was all PG at least, right?! For sure, I don’t know what you’re going to write, or whether I was disrespectful or whatever. I honestly don’t feel I was. I was like, ‘Come on guys, I want to win.’ I’ve still got my fire in my belly. I could feel a bit of it really coming up there.

“I’m not going to apologize for being a fighter. I’m not going to apologize for still wanting it. I know everyone in the team does too, and I truly believe that when we fix some of the problems that we have with the car, we’ll be back in the fight with the Mercedes, with the Bulls. It just can’t come quick enough.

“We’ll try something different in the next race. We’ll keep working on the processes. I look forward to a time when maybe I can fight for a podium. That would be nice.”

The focus was on complaints from both Ferrari drivers about the way the race was being handled, but one of the two main areas of concern coming into the weekend appeared to be seeing progress. Team orders were required because both drivers were fighting for the same positions on track, and while Hamilton was slightly aided by the timing of a virtual safety car, he had shown comparable pace to his teammate.

A far cry from Saudi Arabia two weeks’ ago — Hamilton was extremely downbeat and unable to get the car performing in a way he was happy with. Leclerc scored a podium then, while Hamilton labored to seventh place, whereas his seventh place this time around was on par with what Leclerc was able to achieve.

“I genuinely enjoyed the race,” he said. “I think this weekend, whilst we’re not as quick as we want to be, I feel like I had a better weekend in general. The result might not show it necessarily today, but I was 12th. Very hard to overtake here, cars were obviously so close. I got onto the medium tire, and I felt the car really come alive, and I felt super optimistic in that moment.

“All I could see is the up ahead, and I was thinking maybe we can get up to sixth or something. We lost a lot of time in those laps where Charles and I were battling, and I was clearly quicker in that moment. I didn’t think the decision came quick enough.

“For sure, in that time you’re like, ‘Come on!’ But yeah, that’s really kind of it. I have no problems with the team or with Charles. I think we could do better. The car is where we really need to be . Ultimately we’re fighting for seventh and eighth, so…”

Therein lies the major area of concern for Ferrari. Two identical P7 finishes for Hamilton illicit a totally different response from the driver, and a totally different response from his team principal Fred Vasseur, who initially was concerned about any potential fallout from his drivers.

“Fred came to my room,” Hamilton said. “I just put my hand on his shoulder and was like, ‘Dude, calm down. Don’t be so sensitive.’ I could have said way worse things on the radio — you hear some of the things others have said in the past. Some of it was sarcasm.

“Look, you’ve got to understand we’re under a huge amount of pressure within the car. You’re never going to get the most peaceful messages coming through in the heat of the battle.”

The debrief will be far more painful for Ferrari, though, as it was fairly comfortably beaten by Alex Albon’s Williams and both Mercedes drivers, plus Max Verstappen. But the real gap that needs to be addressed — as it does for all of the chasing pack — is to McLaren.

While Mercedes and Red Bull will be concerned by a half-minute deficit, for Ferrari, the margin to McLaren was nearly an entire minute. Vasseur acknowledges that is an outcome that cannot be allowed to be lost in any way amid the chatter around team radio messages.

“I had a discussion with Lewis and I can perfectly understand the frustration,” Vasseur said. “They are champions, they want to win races. We are asking them to let the team go. It’s not easy. It’s never easy. I didn’t see another team to do it today.

“That’s why we took the responsibility to do it — because it’s the policy to the team. We are racing for Ferrari first and honestly I think as a team we did a good job.

“Again, you can argue that it would have been better to do it half a lap before or half a lap later. But when you are on the pit wall and you have to understand if the car behind is faster than the car in front, if it’s just for DRS or not, it’s not an easy call.

“It’s always much easier to do it two hours later. We asked them to do it, they did it. Now the frustration when you are in the car, I can perfectly understand this. We had a discussion and it was much more relaxed.

“ not the story of the day. We did P6-7, instead of P7-6, or P6-7, or P7-6. I would be much more keen to speak about why we finished one minute behind McLaren.”

Vasseur clearly won’t shy away from it, but that is a far tougher topic to address than radio communications with the drivers — and a very daunting gap to try and reduce heading to one of Ferrari’s home grands prix in Imola next time out.