How Ferrari has downplayed latest Hamilton radio tension in F1 Monaco GP

The 2025 Monaco Grand Prix was another Formula 1 race that left Ferrari in fire-fighting mode afterwards, owing to apparent tensions in radio traffic between Lewis Hamilton and his engineer.

Hamilton was fifth and team-mate Charles Leclerc came second, yielding Ferrari’s best combined points score from a non-sprint weekend this season. And yet, neither driver was in a particularly celebratory mood; Hamilton was noticeably downbeat and taciturn in post-race.

Leclerc might have been hoping for better after challenging for pole on Saturday, and Hamilton certainly was as he lost three grid positions due to a penalty for impeding Max Verstappen at Massenet during Q1.

The incident, caused by the team misinforming him about Verstappen’s approach, set in motion a chain of events that led him to getting “stuck in no man’s land” during the race. What’s more, it also brought more peevish-sounding radio exchanges between Hamilton and race engineer Riccardo Adami to the fore.

Later, Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur sought to dismiss any idea of friction between the two.

“Because when the driver is asking something between Turn 1 and Turn 3, we have to wait [until he reaches] the tunnel to reply, to avoid speaking with him during the corners,” said Vasseur.

“It’s not that we are sleeping, it’s not that we are having a beer on the pitwall, it’s just because we have a section of the track where we agreed before to speak with him.

“And honestly, it’s not a tension that the guy is asking something, he’s between the walls, he’s under pressure, he’s fighting, he’s at 300km/h between the walls.

“I’m perfectly fine and I spoke with him [Hamilton] after the race – he was not upset at all.”

While this all sounds plausible enough – drivers often chafe at being asked questions or offered information while the mental bandwidth is occupied by a challenging set of corners – it is also highly generic. And the most peculiar exchange came after the race, not during it.

“It’s a P5,” said Adami on the radio on the cool-down lap.

“Lost a lot of time in traffic. The rest we need to investigate. And pick up [spent tyre rubber] please.”

Hamilton replied: “Yeah, big thank you to the boys, as I said, for fixing the car [after Saturday’s practice crash].

“It’s not been the easiest of weekends, but we live to fight another day, so… yeah.”

Radio silence then followed, broken by Hamilton asking, “Are you upset with me or something?” He also received no reply to this either.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

Such exchanges have to be weighed in context, especially when played over the TV broadcast, since F1 has recent form in presenting team radio in a misleading fashion to amplify the drama. But this is understood to be the exact way the conversation played out.

It also followed an exchange late in the race where Hamilton asked if the group in front of him on track – Verstappen, Lando Norris, Leclerc and Oscar Piastri were “still nearly a minute ahead”.

Adami’s reply – “Charles on medium [tyres] and McLarens on hard, in [Turn] 16, very close to each other fighting” – was deemed unsatisfactory.

“You’re not answering the question,” replied Hamilton. “It doesn’t really matter, I guess. I was asking if I’m a minute behind or…”

“He’s 48 seconds [ahead],” eventually came the reply. 

The tenor of neither exchange can be explained in the context of where Hamilton happened to be on track and, if he was “not upset at all” when he spoke to Vasseur after the race, he had cheered up considerably between the media pen and the team principal’s office.

Hamilton crossed the line 51.387s after race winner Norris, and 48.256s after team-mate Leclerc. This will have rankled Hamilton, as will having spent the race in the aforementioned “no man’s land” as a direct result of the team mistakenly informing him that Verstappen was slowing down on that Q1 lap.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

The grid penalty left him behind Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls car and Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin for the first stint, until they pitted at the end of laps 14 and 16 respectively.

Two laps of clear air before his own stop enabled Hamilton to overcut them both, but by this point he had leaked 12s to his team-mate because the front group, led by Norris, were doing less tyre-management than Hadjar was to try and build a gap.

Leclerc’s first stop on lap 23 was costlier in terms of lap time than Hamilton’s but from there the general trend was for the gap to grow – on lap 57 alone Lewis lost seven seconds to his team-mate.

Some of these losses can be attributed to traffic – the Racing Bulls and Williams tactics of having one driver bunch the field so their team-mate could pit without cost meant the gap between Alex Albon in 11th (on lap 57) and Nico Hulkenberg in 18th was just 11s.

These cars had moved over smartly enough – for the most part – as the leading group of four came by to lap them but had then resumed their frustrated dance and were slower to part ways for Hamilton.

But much of the 48s deficit came from Hamilton still not being able to conduct his SF-25 quite as quickly as Leclerc. He puts it down to relative unfamiliarity with baked-in Ferrari performance characteristics, but three tenths of a second here and there add up to a big deficit over a race distance.

As Hamilton said after qualifying, “This weekend it’s been a bit of a steep learning curve.”