Singapore GP: Hamilton hit with 5s penalty as brake drama triggers track-limits rap, Alonso fumes on radio
Lewis Hamilton left Marina Bay with more frustration than silverware after the Ferrari driver was docked five seconds for repeated track-limits breaches late in the Singapore Grand Prix, a sanction that dropped him from seventh to eighth behind Fernando Alonso.
The flashpoint arrived in the closing laps as Ferrari released Hamilton from behind Charles Leclerc to chase down Kimi Antonelli for fifth. The push came just as Hamilton’s SF-25 developed a brake issue. From there he began picking up violations like confetti, triggering a black-and-white flag and, inevitably, the stewards’ attention.
“I think it’s for, I cut the circuit or something like that,” Hamilton said beforehand, sounding resigned to another trip to the officials. “I saw my brakes were getting hot but it didn’t say they were at the max. I went into T14 and sparks came off, my pedal went long. So grateful I still made the corner!”
Alonso, tucked in behind and watching it all, was anything but understanding. The Aston Martin driver unloaded on the radio: “I cannot f**ing believe it… Is it safe to drive with no brakes? Five seconds, minimum.” He got his wish.
In their decision, the stewards said Hamilton acknowledged leaving the track several times while “trying to manage a brakes issue,” but noted that isn’t a valid exemption under the Driving Standards Guidelines. In other words: mechanical gremlins don’t buy you extra real estate. Ferrari didn’t contest the call.
It felt inevitable once the black-and-white flag appeared. The only question (as ever in Singapore’s claustrophobic pinch points) was whether Hamilton would get the penalty or somehow slip the net. He didn’t, and with the field as compressed as it often is at Marina Bay, five seconds was enough to reverse the order between him and Alonso at the flag.
There’s a bigger picture here too. This was supposed to be a damage-limitation weekend for Hamilton, and Ferrari’s late green light to attack Antonelli for P5 showed there was still pace to spend. But hustling a car with a long pedal and wayward temps around Singapore is a high-wire act, and the margins — for lines and for legality — are thin. Push too hard and the walls bite; push a little wide and the rulebook bites instead.
Hamilton himself hinted at a trend when he quipped, “I seem to be in the stewards quite often nowadays.” Harsh? Maybe. But 2025 has been a season defined by fine lines at the front and the fringes of the top eight, and those lines are policed more tightly than ever. Crossing them repeatedly, whatever the reason, is always going to bring a bill.
As for Alonso, he played the pantomime villain-turned-enforcer to perfection: outrage on the radio, opportunism on the stopwatch, and a tidy gain in the classification when the penalty landed. He’s been around long enough to know that when the guy ahead is flirting with the white lines, the smart play is to keep your powder dry and let Race Control do the heavy lifting.
The stewards’ wording was blunt and by the book, and it sets a useful marker for the rest of the flyaway swing. Drivers can nurse problems, but they can’t do it off the circuit. That’s not controversial, just consistent — and consistency is what teams have been begging for on track limits.
For Ferrari, there’s a touch of what-if about it all. The SF-25 had enough in hand to turn a quiet seventh into something punchier, but the knife-edge around Marina Bay, paired with those braking gremlins, turned ambition into attrition. For Aston Martin, it’s a small Sunday win — a radio rant that ended with a net gain.
On to the next one. And for Hamilton, perhaps, a quieter week with the officials would be just as valuable as a setup breakthrough. In a championship fight where every point feels magnified, keeping it between the lines has never mattered more.
