Fred Vasseur isn’t ready to throw Lewis Hamilton under the bus just yet.
Ferrari’s team boss has moved to cool the noise around Hamilton’s bruising Hungarian Grand Prix, framing the seven-time champion’s slump as a story of fine margins gone the wrong way rather than a crisis of confidence or talent.
In Budapest, Hamilton fell out in Q2 by 0.015s after running ahead of Charles Leclerc in Q1. Leclerc went on to score Ferrari’s first pole of the season; Hamilton started 12th and finished there, audibly furious with himself over team radio and even quipping the team should “change driver.” Asked afterwards if he’d be back after the break for Zandvoort, Hamilton’s reply was pointedly brief: “I look forward to coming back… Hopefully I will be back, yeah.”
Vasseur’s view? The picture looks worse than it is. “Often it’s down to circumstances, and Lewis has been on the unlucky side more often than not recently,” he told Auto Motor und Sport. “In Budapest, he was ahead of Charles in Q1 and was only a tenth slower in Q2. He was 15 thousandths short of advancing. In the end, one is first and the other is twelfth. Of course, that looks silly.”
He even suggested both Ferraris were teetering on the same knife-edge. “We would have ended up in eleventh and twelfth place with our two drivers,” Vasseur added.
The head-to-head tells its own story so far in 2025. All five of Ferrari’s podiums belong to Leclerc, who holds a sizeable points cushion over Hamilton in the standings. That gap, plus the optics of Hamilton’s radio angst and middling race result, have fed an easy narrative: Hamilton hasn’t delivered the blockbuster Ferrari debut many expected.
Vasseur pushed back on the tone, if not the facts. The car is close, the deficits tiny, and Hamilton’s intensity can sometimes amplify issues. “We solve the problems step by step. They’re not huge, they just look that way,” he said, pointing to things like brake feel costing “maybe half a tenth.” That, he added, is the difference between Q2 and Q3. “Lewis sometimes exaggerates the problems he sees in the car. The team then naturally wants to respond, and everyone jumps on this problem.”
Ferrari remain best of the rest behind McLaren, with Mercedes lurking not far behind in the Constructors’ fight as the season heads into its final 10 rounds. Hamilton’s task after the break is simple enough to say and fiendish to execute: stop the spiral of bad breaks, tidy up Saturdays, and turn those half-tenths into something the timing screens finally reward.
