“Yesterday they were scaring me,” said a jubilant Lewis Hamilton after stepping out of his Ferrari at the end of sprint qualifying.
Contrary to all expectations — including those of his and every other team on the grid — he’d just pinched pole position for the Silverstone sprint race, pipping title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli by just 0.011 seconds.
It was the slimmest pole margin in any qualifying format of the season, but the gap to Antonelli didn’t matter. Just being in the fight was significant for the nine-time Silverstone winner.
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“They were like, ‘We’re going to be 0.6 seconds off in a straight line to [Mercedes]’ — and in the last race we were 0.4 seconds off in a straight line.
“But today all of a sudden we’re kind of there. [After leading practice] I was like, ‘Is this real? Are they going to turn up in qualifying?’ and we were right there competing with them.”
Ferrari was almost universally given no real hope of being competitive at Silverstone after its disastrous afternoon in Austria, where its engine — despite having received its first upgrade of the year — appeared badly down on performance relative to Mercedes.
Silverstone, with lots of long straights and flat-out corners but with few big braking zones to charge the battery, was expected to leave the Ferrari motor breathless again.
But instead the British track has recast Austria as an outlier.
After winning the preceding Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, Hamilton again looks on form.
What’s more, the telemetry data suggests the Ferrari engine upgrade written off as a flop last week might actually be working.
It’s only sprint qualifying, but Ferrari might still be on the right trajectory after all.
“I am so happy — so, so happy,” Hamilton said.
“I always want to bring it back to everyone back in the factory. I can’t say it enough.
“They’re pushing. Last year we were kind of stuck in a rut, there was not a lot we could do, but now they’re finding things and they’re adding things to the car.
“Every single weekend we’re bringing small little bits and adding performance to this car. It just felt awesome.”
HOW COULD THINGS LOOK SO DIFFERENT?
The fact Hamilton was competitive in practice as well as sprint qualifying strongly suggests this wasn’t a fluke performance. Even teammate Charles Leclerc was in the ballpark, with around half of his 0.327-second deficit all at the final chicane.
It’s a remarkable reversal of Ferrari’s damning Spielberg form.
Though Ferrari’s pace at the Red Bull Ring seemed perfectly explainable given its season-long power deficit, there were some quirks peculiar to that weekend not present at Silverstone that give us some hints as to how the team has pulled off this turnaround.
The most obvious ones are altitude and heat.
The Red Bull Ring is situated around 750 metres above sea level, where the air is less dense. The weekend also took place in scorching temperatures amid a European heatwave, with some measurements returning a track temperature in excess of 60°C.
That combination of factors puts cooling at an extreme premium.
The Ferrari engine was designed to run hot for performance reasons, but the Austrian conditions were too extreme to handle — and we heard Hamilton being told to turn down his engine for temperature reasons during the race.
The consequences of the cooling problem are that the car had to have its cooling louvres opened wider, but that increased drag. Downforce was taken off to counteract the loss of power in the extreme temperatures, but that in turn made tyre wear much worse.
It became a negative spiral of performance.
At sea-level Silverstone and in far milder climes, we’re getting a more accurate performance benchmark.
The telemetry data paints a remarkable picture.
Whereas the Ferrari was 20 kilometres per hour down on Mercedes at some points around the Red Bull Racing, at Silverstone the Italian engine looked like a match.
In fact Hamilton was 11 kilometres per hour faster than Antonelli through Copse, and as both cars washed off speed as their batteries ran flat, Hamilton remained faster all the way to Chapel.
He paid a little of that back when both cars maxed on down Hangar, but he was faster again out of Stowe into the final chicane.
The more representative conditions have also allowed Ferrari to run in a happier aerodynamic configuration, which is also helping it take better care of the tyres — and tyre overheating does not appear to be a major factor so far this weekend, taking that relative weakness out of the equation.
That last part is crucial in answering the next question: could Hamilton be on track for another win, in the sprint if not also in the grand prix?
“The car felt great on the long run, to be honest,” he said. “It’s going to be tough, obviously, with [Mercedes] — they’re very, very close — but I don’t think it’s impossible. We’re in a great position.”
VASSEUR BITES BACK OVER COST CAP
Ferrari’s reappearance at the very front of the field put Toto Wolff’s commentary about the Italian team’s upgrade schedule back in the spotlight.
In Austria the Mercedes boss said he was “surprised” by the rate of Ferrari’s development program, linking it to questions about its spending.
“Ferrari seems to be limitless in that way,” he said. “In my opinion, they need to be running out of money soon, cost cap money, because we can’t do that. We’re simply lacking the buffer in the cost cap to be able to bring so many parts in the way they do.”
That commentary followed the big upgrade package that propelled Ferrari to victory in Barcelona. The team brought more new parts to England, though they were relatively minor.
That commentary incensed Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur, who gave the impression on Friday that he was restraining himself in reply.
“I found it quite ironic coming from Toto and Mercedes,” he said. “When Red Bull is developing or when Mercedes is developing, they are genius. When we are developing, we are cheating.
“I think you have to calm down with this. We didn’t bring more parts than Red Bull or another one. I don’t know if it was a joke, but … if you think that we overshoot the cost cap, for me it’s going into this direction [accusations of cheating].
“Go to Toto, ask him why he spoke about me; don’t ask me the question. Honestly, I have no clue, and I found it a bit weird.”
He said “it was better to avoid speaking” in reply to follow-up questions on the matter.
Vasseur admitted, though, that Ferrari was deliberately front-loading development on this year’s car, suggesting the team’s development budget would run dry later in the season.
“I think the more performance you can bring at the beginning … if we can bring something at the beginning, we do it, and it’s better to have a couple of tenths for five races than a couple of tenths for the last two.”
Though he added that the upgrade count — published by the FIA ahead of each weekend — could be misleading because it could equate minor revisions to bits of the car with completely new parts.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to find performance, sometimes a bit less,” he said. “Sometimes you can have the feeling that we are bringing a big upgrade but is just a modification of some parts, nothing else.”
It’s impossible to separate this spat from the broader politics of this season — arguments over engine designs that have gone against both sides and, more recently, Ferrari lobbying that forced Mercedes to remove and upgrade from its car.
A faster Ferrari will only renew this as a narrative in the potential championship battle between Ferrari and Mercedes.
ANTONELLI PUTS RUSSELL BACK IN HIS BOX
Ferrari’s narrow sprint pole was indicative of its improvement, but it’s impossible for Antonelli not to think top spot was up for grabs given the extremely narrow margin.
“SQ3 was a little bit left on the table, but it was a decent lap, and unfortunately it was super close to Lewis, but of course congrats to him, and on our side we’ll focus on tomorrow.
“Ferrari have done an incredible step forward, so definitely it’s going to be very tough. Plus Lewis is in great form. But that’s good — we like the challenge, and we’ll try to make the best out of it.”
There’s no reason to doubt that Mercedes can win the sprint and go on to control the weekend.
If it does so, however, all signs are that it will be Antonelli leading the way again, with teammate George Russell comfortably beaten in sprint qualifying.
The Briton was 0.346 seconds slower than his teammate, carrying over a similar stubborn margin from the sole practice session earlier in the day. His deficit appears to be everywhere, with worse exits from every key corner leaving him to haemorrhage time down every long flat-out section.
“It’s kind of the story of the year, to be honest,” a downcast Russell lamented. “Always on the back foot.
“Usually come Q3 we can generally make a step. Today that was not quite the case.
“It was very close to P3 [0.03 seconds], but it was still very much off the pace of Lewis and Kimi. I need to try and understand why that is. It’s a bit strange.
“I think it’s feeling quite good out there, to be honest. It’s not feeling too bad … relative lap time is just not really there, so I just need to understand [that].”
While we’ve seen Mercedes reverse deficits to other teams between the sprint and the grand prix, the performance picture between its drivers has never swapped except for in China, where Russell’s grand prix qualifying performance was compromised by technical problems.
Between Miami and Canada, the gaps between them changed a cumulative 0.003 seconds.
Unless Russell discovers a material car problem that can explain this deficit, history would suggest little chance of reversing it in time for his home grand prix.
HOW DIFFERENT ARE THESE CARS TO LAST YEAR?
One of the big concerns aired in the drivers’ group chat coming into this weekend was how badly this year’s engine would suit the fast and flowing Silverstone track.
The long straights and fast bends are split up by only four braking zones, only one of which is considered heavy, which means there are few places for the cars to naturally charge their batteries.
Instead we’re back into the realms of ‘superclipping’, where combustion engine power is redirected to the battery through the fast corners to be used down the straight, where energy is better spent.
Though several drivers were positively surprised that things weren’t quite as dire as they feared, there are still some painfully obvious moments around the lap at which these cars look unnatural.
Though acceleration is notably faster in 2026, speed tops out more quickly, and as the battery empties, the revs fall and speed washes off surprisingly quickly.
The cars are already out of energy at turn 1, Abbey, and decelerate all the way to Village, where they’re 34 kilometre per hour slower than last year when they hit the brakes.
Power runs out again halfway down the Wellington straight. By the braking zone the difference is 27 kilometres per hour.
The 2026 cars approach Copse faster but top out just before entry. There’s a difference of 18 kilometres per hour in minimum speed on exit.
But it’s through the famous Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel that the difference is most painful.
The cars are travelling almost 60 kilometres per hour slower into Becketts and are 17 kilometres per hour slower through Chapel.
Cars switch to charging around a quarter of the way down the Hangar straight, creating a 25-kilometre-per-hour difference towards Stowe, and there’s around da 20-kilometre-per-hour difference before braking for the last chicane.
The total lap time difference is 3.484 seconds. Some of that will be down to having less downforce on the cars this year, but clearly some of it down to the engine.
People will have different opinions on whether that matters — and those opinions could come down to whether these new cars can produce better racing, starting the sprint.
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