Why Lewis Hamilton had a positive F1 Dutch GP despite race-ending crash

Lewis Hamilton cut a disconsolate figure even before turning a wheel during the Dutch GP weekend, arriving at Ferrari’s pre-event press conference with his coat zipped up around his face, and muttering his monosyllabic responses to questions into it rather than the microphone.

But despite this, a pair of practice sessions which team boss Frederic Vasseur described as Ferrari’s “worst Friday of the past three years”, and a race-ending crash, Hamilton was far more upbeat as he prepared to leave Zandvoort than when he arrived.

Both Ferraris finished Friday’s first practice session outside the top 10, over a second and a half off the pacesetting McLaren of Lando Norris. In second practice, they were closer but still nearly a second off.

After what Hamilton’s team-mate Charles Leclerc called “probably one of the biggest [setup] changes of this season from one day to another”, the Ferrari drivers qualified sixth and seventh. Most tellingly, Hamilton’s best Q3 lap was just 0.050s off Leclerc’s: this was a phase of qualifying where he had struggled to string a lap together earlier in the season and had often ended up three or more tenths off Charles.

“I’m the type that’s always searching for more, like everywhere,” he said after qualifying. “It’s a little bit in the tyre pressure, a little bit in the blanket temperatures, a little bit in ride height, front, rear. I’m looking at everything and I think what’s clear is the difference from where I was before [earlier in the season].”

During the race he was running behind former Mercedes team-mate George Russell for sixth when, shortly after the onset of light rain, he put his front-right wheel on the white line at the outer edge of the banked Turn 3, causing a rear-end twitch which sent his Ferrari onto the painted Aramco logo on the asphalt boundary. From there, recovery was always going to be a long shot and he smote the barrier at the exit.

While both Ferrari drivers had said they struggled relative to the frontrunners through the ‘long’, tight Turns 9 and 10, this is not quite borne out by data analysis. In fact, on Hamilton’s fastest Q3 lap, he shaved over a six-hundredths off his deficit to Oscar Piastri’s pole lap between the apexes of 9 and 10.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Erik Junius

Most of his time loss came in Turn 3 and at the exit – he was 0.097s down at Turn 2, 0.422s cresting the rise after the exit of Turn 3. That is where his Ferrari had been recalcitrant right from his first push lap in FP1, where it got a rear-end twitch as he downshifted under braking – and the next time around he spun. The data revealed an RPM spike under braking, consistent with the issues Hamilton has been reporting this season.

So in that context, perhaps it’s not surprising this is the corner that bit him as conditions grew trickier. From lap 17 onwards, he had been gradually reeling in Russell at up to three tenths of a second per lap before the umbrellas started to go up.

“I feel fine mentally,” said Hamilton after the race. “I felt lots of positives. I felt like I was making progress. I was catching the car ahead.

“It’s tough to have a result like that, for sure. I’ve been racing for so long. I’ve had God knows how many races in my life. I’m probably counting on one hand that sort of incident.”

Vasseur was also emphatic that Hamilton’s accident was brought on by being caught out by the conditions rather than a lack of confidence in the car.

“This was a bit of a special one,” he said. “The track was damp during the first drizzle and he [Hamilton] was wider than the lap before. We need to investigate if something happened on the car, but I don’t think so.

“Overall the reaction from Lewis was good; he was up to the pace of the car and of Charles from the beginning of the weekend, catching up Russell and fighting with him. It was a good recovery after two tough races before the break, but the outcome is not the one expected.