Hamilton thought he'd replicate Leclerc's pre-race crash

Lewis Hamilton has revealed he nearly crashed on the Miami sprint race reconnaissance lap at exactly the same point as his Ferrari Formula 1 team-mate Charles Leclerc.

Leclerc had to sit out the sprint having slewed into the wall at Turn 10 in the very wet conditions before the race start.

Hamilton made the most of a perfectly timed switch from intermediate to slick tyres to take third place in the race, his best result since winning the China sprint in March, but admitted he came close to not even making the grid as well.

“Obviously Charles had that moment,” Hamilton said. “I had exactly the same moment because I was right behind him, and somehow it just stopped going towards the wall right at the last moment.

“That was nearly both of us out.”

Leclerc took full responsibility for his crash, though he also intimated that Ferrari being one of the few to use intermediates not full wets for the laps to the grid was unwise in hindsight.

“It's frustrating but at the end of the day, I can only blame myself for it,” said Leclerc.

“Going out with the inters in those conditions was probably not the best choice but on the other hand these things shouldn't happen.

“I felt a bit like a passenger because it's in a straight line and it's not like you are pushing in a straight line, so I was just cruising until I completely lost control of the car because of the aquaplaning and I had no way out of it.”

Hamilton’s gamble explained

Hamilton struggled in the first half of the race and was running a distant sixth with Alex Albon’s Williams and Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin pressuring him before becoming the second driver to pit for slick tyres as conditions improved.

When post-race press conference host Tom Clarkson said Hamilton the “first frontrunner” to pit, Hamilton’s reply of “I don’t think I was a frontrunner was I? I was sixth or something!” summed up his view of how badly his race had been going before the tyre change chance transformed it.

“I’m so happy, really, really happy with the result to get up here because it wasn’t looking very good,” he conceded.

“Through qualifying we were obviously quite a chunk off these guys [the McLarens that finished 1-2] and then on the inters I was just sliding around, I had the Williams behind me and there was another one behind him who I was most likely going to get overtaken by.

“So I rolled the dice. I was on full lock through Turn 12 and full lock through Turn 16 and it still wasn’t turning. So I was like ‘let’s just go for it’.

“Honestly I should’ve done it a lap or two before that, I think it would’ve been probably the same result because these guys [the McLarens] were a bit too far ahead.

“But I’m really, really happy to get back up there and get the points.”

Hamilton had been morose and perplexed after races and qualifying sessions for much of the time since his Shanghai sprint win, even suggesting after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix that he feared he might struggle for the whole of the rest of his first Ferrari F1 season.

He was more positive in Miami, while admitting that “we’re not extracting everything from the car” and that “there’s a lot of elements that we need to elevate”.

Asked by The Race if even a result achieved on strategy not pure pace still offered a glimmer of hope and a morale lift, Hamilton replied “yeah, every moment counts”, and sounded more optimistic about his chances of eventually getting on top of the 2025 Ferrari.

“It’s definitely been not so great obviously since China (pictured above),” he admitted.

“But looking at it you can definitely see why we’ve been in the position we’ve been in.

“Coming into this weekend, we have made some changes but we have more to do in order to be fighting more consistently at the front.

“So we just need to knuckle down and I do believe we can get some better results.”