MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — From the moment Lewis Hamilton lowered himself into a Ferrari cockpit for the first time, it was inevitable that every one of Red 44’s radio transmissions, strategy decisions and race results would be scrutinized to the nth degree. Such things are unavoidable when the most successful driver in Formula 1 history joins the sport’s most famous team.
During his first race in red in Australia, relatively simple messages relating to the use of a “K1” setting on the steering wheel went viral, even though Hamilton peppered his responses to new race engineer Riccardo Adami with the word “please.” A week later at the second round in China, F1’s world feed failed to broadcast a message in which Hamilton offered to give up his position to teammate Charles Leclerc, meaning crucial context was missing as the rest of the pit-to-car radio played out and made it sound like the seven-time world champion was at odds with the decision to swap.
And then on Sunday, amid the South Florida heat that accompanied one of Ferrari’s least convincing performances of 2025, a series of radio messages boiled over into a team orders controversy after the checkered flag fell on the Miami Grand Prix.
What happened?
Strip away the soundbites and Ferrari’s biggest issue in Miami was a lack of performance. Radio messages, questionable strategy calls and any frustrations during or after the race all stemmed from a lack of competitive lap times throughout the weekend. A glance at the race classification offers the simplest representation of how bad the weekend was, with Leclerc finishing seventh, 57 seconds off race winner Oscar Piastri, and Hamilton in eighth.
Rather than fighting Mercedes and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull for the final podium position behind the dominant McLarens, Ferrari found itself struggling to hold off Carlos Sainz in the slower of the two Williams while Alex Albon in the sister car finished nine seconds ahead of Leclerc in fifth. For a team that was only 14 points adrift of last year’s constructors’ champion McLaren, it was the latest in the Italian outfit’s series of brutal wake-up calls in 2025.
The gulf between Ferrari’s preseason expectations and in-race realities only heightened tensions when Leclerc and Hamilton found themselves sharing the same piece of track in the second half of the race. Opting for different strategies in line with their respective grid positions (Leclerc started eighth on medium tires and Hamilton 12th on hards), the races of the two Prancing Horses started to converge around lap 32 and were squarely on top of each other by lap 38.
Hamilton had gained on Leclerc thanks to a well-timed pit stop from hards to mediums under a Virtual Safety Car period, while Leclerc had made his change from mediums to hards under normal racing conditions a few laps later. Running in tandem on lap 34, they performed a tag-team-style overtake on Sainz in which Leclerc lunged past the Williams at Turn 1 and in doing so opened the door for Hamilton to sneak past in the same corner.
Hamilton, running on a softer compound tire with more immediate performance potential, was the faster of the two Ferraris at that stage, but was wary that he was damaging his tires by running in his teammate’s aerodynamic wake. Andrea Kimi Antonelli in sixth place was five seconds further up the road and Hamilton felt he had a shot at chasing down the Mercedes driver if he could just get past Leclerc.
“I’m just burning up my tires behind him,” Hamilton said over team radio on lap 36. “You want me to just sit here the whole race?”
Adami responded: “We’ll come back to you.”
Such exchanges have been a trait of Ferrari team radio in recent years. The driver, cocooned in their cockpit while events unfold at 200 mph, wants an immediate decision, only for the pit wall to effectively put them on hold.
With Sainz still only 1.5 seconds behind, Ferrari’s strategists were worried a swap could slow both cars and undo the good work of the double overtake on lap 34.
Adami eventually returned the call and said: “We want to keep the DRS to Charles, go ahead like this. Carlos behind 1.5.”
As Hamilton’s pace advantage over his teammate became indisputably clear, Ferrari finally agreed to a swap on lap 38, but by that point Hamilton appeared to be losing patience.
“This is not good teamwork, that’s all I’m going to say,” he said. “In China, I got out the way …”
Adami interrupted with: “We swap the cars.”
To which Hamilton quipped: “Have a tea break while you’re at it, come on!”
Over the next 12 laps, Hamilton was able to halve the gap to Antonelli, bringing it down to 2.5 seconds, but with every passing lap his tire advantage over Leclerc was waning and by lap 44 the two Ferraris were once again split by a second. Up until the swap back on lap 53 of 57, Leclerc went through the same frustrations as Hamilton.
“I think we should have discussed a little bit more before doing the swap, because you’re trying to go to the end with those tires,” Leclerc said after the race. “I’m trying to do a good job with my tires and then everything is tricky.
“I did not expect Carlos to be so close [behind]. All of this made the situation a bit trickier, but I think there’s plenty for us to look at. As I said, we need to do a step and we need to be robust enough that whenever we find ourselves in those situations, we do better.”
Hamilton said the laps spent bottled up behind Leclerc had taken some life out of his tires, but was still doubtful if he would have had the pace to catch Antonelli had the initial swap been enacted earlier.
“I lost quite a bit of the tires in that, which is OK,” he said. “We were battling for position at the end of the day, but it would have been great if we could have maybe done what Valtteri [Bottas, Hamilton’s former teammate at Mercedes] and I did in Budapest years ago where move, see if I can catch him, if I can’t, move back. But ultimately, it didn’t work out.
“Whether or not we could have overtaken the Mercedes, at the end of the day, we were not quick enough. And that’s probably where the frustration has come from.”
On the tone of his messages to Adami during the race, Hamilton added: “It wasn’t even anger. 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.”
When he was told his messages were the most entertaining part of the race, Hamilton laughed and said: “Jeez, I mean, it was all PG at least, right?
“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 didn’t think the decision came quick enough. And for sure, in that time you’re like, ‘Come on!’ But that’s really kind of it. I have no problems with the team or with Charles. I think we could do better, but the car is not where we really need to be. Ultimately we’re fighting for seventh and eighth.”
How did Ferrari explain the decision?
Following the race, team principal Frédéric Vasseur met with Hamilton in Ferrari’s hospitality to talk through the events before his driver faced the media. The Frenchman, who has had a close relationship with Hamilton for more than two decades, said the purpose of the chat was to explain the pit wall’s thinking rather than an exercise in preemptive PR.
“My concern is not that he has to speak with TV, it’s that we need to be clear between us that, in this situation, he has to understand what was my feeling on the pit wall,” Vasseur said. “He can trust me, I can trust him and the same with Charles. And when I have to take a decision, I’m taking a decision for Ferrari.”
Hamilton also gave an account of the meeting on Sunday evening.
“Fred came to my room. I just put my hand on his shoulder and was like, ‘Dude, calm down. Don’t be so sensitive,'” he said. “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, but 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.”
Vasseur said the delay in enacting the first swap between the drivers was due to the team wanted to check if Hamilton had a genuine performance advantage as a result of his softer tires or was simply benefiting from being in DRS range of Leclerc. Hamilton was within a second of Leclerc (and therefore in DRS range) from lap 35 through to lap 38 when the swap was made, although Vasseur claims only a single lap was lost in making the decision.
“Let’s go directly to the point: it didn’t take so long,” he said. “It was one lap and a half or something like this. And when we have two cars, not with the same strategy, the first thing for me to understand if [Hamilton’s car] is faster when you are behind due to the DRS or not. It took us one lap.
He added: “It’s not the story of the day whether we [finished] 6-7, instead of 7-6 or 6-7 or 7-6. I would be much more keen to speak about why we finished one minute behind McLaren.”
Can Ferrari turn the tide?
In the world of sport, gaining access to the real-time conversations of participants, such as the ones that played out on Ferrari’s team radio, is rare. Inevitably things are said in the heat of competition that lose some of their context when written on a page. It’s also important to note that Hamiton’s frustrations stemmed from the team’s strategy decisions, and therefore were not aimed directly at Adami himself, who would have had no say over the swap despite conveying the messages.
Nevertheless, Ferrari’s decision-making process appeared muddled at a crucial point of the race and both drivers were well within their rights to vent frustration and plead their case.
“There’s no bad feelings with Lewis, not at all,” Leclerc said. “I understand as well that Lewis is trying to do something different, so I appreciate that. I would have done the same thing if I was him and trying to be a bit more aggressive with the medium tires.
“We need to separate the two things. Yes, we need to fix those [strategy] issues that probably cost us one position, but the other seven or six positions are down to the car and we need to make it better.”
On that message, Ferrari is united: the car simply isn’t quick enough to challenge at the front.
An upgrade package is expected to arrive in time for the upcoming triple header of Imola, Monaco and Spain, and on Sunday Hamilton hinted at a fix to the problems he has faced since his car was disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix for running too low to the ground.
“Something’s holding us back at the moment,” he said. “We’ve lost performance since China — and it’s there, it’s just we can’t use it. Until we get a fix for that, then this is where we are.
“Still, for us, we’re battling with the Williams here, so we’re clearly not as quick as we want to be. 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 Red Bulls.
“It just can’t come quick enough.”
Source: espn.com