Lewis Hamilton Says Ferrari ‘Had the Car to Fight for a Win’ Before Brake Failure Ended His Spanish Grand Prix

• Lewis Hamilton retired from the Spanish Grand Prix after seven laps once his Ferrari’s brakes began failing, his first non finish of the 2026 season.
• Hamilton said the pedal “took a step” under braking for Turn 5 and that he did not “really know” where the fault came from, after later brushing the barrier at Turn 20 and pulling into the pits.
• The result leaves Hamilton 101 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, while the Briton still insisted Ferrari “had the car to fight for a win” in Madrid.

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A Promising Start Undone in Seven Laps

Lewis Hamilton’s Spanish Grand Prix looked full of promise for almost no time at all. He got ahead of pole sitter Lando Norris and Kimi Antonelli as the lights went out, briefly threatened to lead the race outright, and then watched a mechanical fault strip it all away before he had completed ten laps at the Madring.

Max Verstappen cut across Turn 1 rather than concede third place to Hamilton at the start, an act his own Red Bull team told him to reverse once the opening laps settled down. Verstappen argued over team radio that he had no choice but to run wide to avoid contact, but he heeded the instruction and handed the position back. It was almost immediately afterward, in the middle of that recovered third place, that Hamilton’s Ferrari began to betray him.

Chaos at the Front Before the Brakes Failed

The opening lap had already produced plenty of drama before Hamilton’s mechanical trouble began. Antonelli attacked Norris at the start and briefly took the lead by cutting the first chicane under braking, before handing the position straight back. He tried again around the outside at the next chicane, bailed out across the run off a second time, and let Norris back through, only for Verstappen to slip past him in the process and take second.

Verstappen’s Turn 1 move on Hamilton then triggered the instruction from Red Bull to give the place back to both Antonelli and Hamilton, dropping him to third. Norris, meanwhile, had already begun pulling clear at the front, 3.2 seconds ahead of Antonelli by lap four and five seconds clear by lap nine, the exact pace advantage that would later make the timing of the Virtual Safety Car so painful for the Briton.

‘The Pedal Went Long’

Hamilton started to report braking issues within the opening laps and told his team over the radio that he had glanced the wall. Asked afterward by Sky F1 whether contact with the barrier had caused the fault, he said the problem had started even earlier than that.

“It was already basically before that,” Hamilton said. “Braking for Turn 5 I hit the brake, the car started stopping and then the pedal took a step and all of a sudden the car didn’t de-accelerate as fast a normal. I ended up carrying a lot of speed in and just brushed the barrier. After that the pedal came back and then a few corners later, the pedal went long. I don’t really know where that’s come from.”

The fault continued to worsen over the following laps. Hamilton ran deep into the Turn 20 run off area, rejoined the circuit, and pulled into the pits to retire after just seven laps, the first time he has failed to finish a Grand Prix this season.

A Weekend That Promised More

The retirement stung more given how competitive Ferrari had looked over the weekend, with both cars capable of running near the front once the race settled into a rhythm. Hamilton had challenged for pole position on Saturday before losing out, and Sunday’s race saw team mate Charles Leclerc lead a chunk of laps as Ferrari kept him out on hard tyres in hope of a late Safety Car, before he eventually settled for fourth once the caution never arrived.

“We’ve had a pretty decent car, a good car this weekend and I think we will continue to try and improve it and I think we have better results coming in the future,” Hamilton said. He added that the mechanical failure had cost the team a result the pace deserved. “I think the team’s done an amazing job, so I’m sad for them today that they couldn’t get max points. I think we had the car to fight for a win today, and unfortunately it just didn’t work out.”

A Championship Gap That Keeps Growing

Antonelli’s eighth win of the season, his second in eight days after Monza, stretched his championship lead to a season high 81 points over second placed George Russell. Hamilton fared worse still. The retirement leaves him 101 points off the front of the standings with nine rounds of the season left to run, a gap Sky Sports has already described as leaving him all but out of title contention.

Team principal Fred Vasseur’s side of the garage tried to fix Hamilton’s brake problem remotely before deciding the risk of continuing on Madrid’s unforgiving street circuit outweighed any points still on offer. Once Hamilton was out of the car, Ferrari’s attention turned to Leclerc, who had been sacrificing track position by staying out longer than his rivals in search of a caution period that never came in time to help him.

A Wider Ferrari Problem

Hamilton and Leclerc had qualified fourth and fifth, less than two tenths of a second off Norris’s pole time but still unable to start any higher, and Leclerc pointed to Saturday afternoons as the root of Ferrari’s difficulties on Sundays. “I feel like we are losing the results we want on the Sunday because of a lack of performance on the Saturday. This is where we should focus,” he said after his own race, which ended in fourth having led 32 of the 57 laps.

“We need to do a step on the Saturday, especially in Qualifying as we seem to be on the back foot compared to our competitors,” Leclerc said. “Then in the race we are strong but not enough to overtake on track.” It is a pattern that has now cost Ferrari at circuits including the Hungaroring, Zandvoort and the Madring, tracks where a lack of grid position proves difficult to recover from once the lights go out.

Ferrari’s Silver Lining

Leclerc’s fourth place finish was the clearest evidence Ferrari had that stronger results had been within reach at Formula 1’s newest venue, even with the Madring’s tight layout making overtaking difficult all weekend. Hamilton now carries that belief into the next round of the season in Baku, chasing the kind of result a failing brake pedal took away from him before his Spanish Grand Prix had even properly begun.

Formula 1 heads into a triple header starting September 24, with the Azerbaijan Grand Prix moving to a Saturday race day for the first time. For Hamilton, the sequence of races arrives at a point where every result now counts for salvaging respect in a difficult first Ferrari season more than for any lingering hope of the title itself. Fixing the brake issue, and the Saturday shortfall Leclerc described, will do more for that goal than any single result at the Madring could have.

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More F1 Reading

• George Russell Admits He Is ‘Not in the Fight’ for the F1 Title After Kimi Antonelli’s Madrid Win
• Max Verstappen Explains Contentious Lewis Hamilton Clash at the Start of the Spanish Grand Prix
• Lando Norris Calls F1’s Virtual Safety Car Rules ‘Unfair’ After Losing the Spanish Grand Prix to Kimi Antonelli
• Kimi Antonelli Wins First Race At The Madring

Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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