Monza loves a tow. Ferrari said no.
With the tifosi on their feet and slipstreams there for the taking, Ferrari elected not to play qualifying tow games at the Italian Grand Prix — despite having Lewis Hamilton carrying a five-place grid penalty and therefore out of pole contention. The call left Charles Leclerc to fend for himself in Q3, and it left Hamilton exactly where he wanted to be: not the sacrificial lamb.
“Do I feel like they should have? I don’t,” Hamilton said after qualifying, speaking to reporters in the Monza paddock. “It’s not something I ever did in any of my other teams, potentially end up sacrificing one of the drivers. And I’ve already got a five-place penalty, so point-wise, I needed to be as high as I could.”
In the end, Leclerc settled for P4, with Hamilton just over a tenth adrift to lock out P5 on pure pace before the penalty bites. The Briton drops to 10th for Sunday’s start, a reminder that his Dutch GP yellow flag infringement is still shaping Ferrari’s home weekend.
Tactically, the case for a tow was there. Monza’s main straight makes a free handful of km/h worth a small eternity, and the top-10 were compressing into the smallest of margins — seven tenths from first to 10th in Q3. But Ferrari weighed the risk, opted for clean air, and refused to compromise both cars. Tow trains can get messy, and at this level the execution has to be perfect. It rarely is.
For Hamilton, the bigger story was the direction of travel. “I’m happy with the progress through the weekend,” he said. “The progress from last weekend, and then carried that through this week. FP1, the car felt great — probably the best. We went into P2, made changes into qualifying, and I think it was the most we could get from it.”
This is still early-days Ferrari-Hamilton, and anyone expecting instant alchemy hasn’t been watching how tight 2025 is. The seven-time champion admitted Monza sharpened his focus on the bigger picture after some rougher weekends as a new Scuderia driver. “These last couple of races have been [about that],” he said. “Let all that stuff go and just focus on delivering the job, coming here positive, absorbing the positivity from the fans, and also the team have been incredible.
“We’re not where we want to be. We don’t have the pace that we want, actually, and that is what it is. But, fourth and fifth today, it’s good to be close. That’s definitely progress, and I know I’ve got to progress from there, so I want to keep on working at it with my engineers to extract more.”
Sunday will demand exactly that. From P10, Hamilton’s afternoon becomes a study in patience, positioning and raw traction out of the Rettifilo. The good news? He likes the car’s legs. “With the penalty and everyone being so close, it’s going to be, naturally, tough to overtake everybody ahead of me,” he admitted. “But we’ve got good top-line speed, so I’m really hoping that I can try to make up some ground. Probably a good start, a good first lap, good strategy. We’ll go away now and try and figure out what we can do to try to leapfrog the guys up ahead of me, if possible.”
There’s a quiet logic to Ferrari’s no-tow stance. Banking two clean laps, minimizing traffic risk and keeping Hamilton as high as possible before the penalty preserves options — and options are currency at Monza, where DRS trains can lock the order for long stretches. Leclerc still starts at the sharp end, Hamilton has a car that’s slippery in a straight line, and Ferrari avoids the optics of one red car tripping over itself to serve the other.
Leclerc’s fourth and Hamilton’s nominal fifth were also a decent read on Ferrari’s current pace window: in the fight, not dictating it. That lines up with what both the driver and the team have been saying for weeks. The tifosi won’t want to hear about “progress” forever, but this looked like a team executing to its level — and not getting greedy.
If Ferrari needed a reminder that Monza is about precision as much as romance, Saturday delivered it. They kept their powder dry. Now they’ll try to light it properly on Sunday.
