Hamilton hauls limping Ferrari to P4 in Austin — and rolls past 5,000 career points
Lewis Hamilton nursed a wounded SF-25 to the flag at Circuit of the Americas, clinging to fourth place after a sudden last-lap loss of front grip that had Oscar Piastri filling his mirrors and Ferrari holding its breath.
With two miles to run, Hamilton thought he’d clipped something. Turn 5 arrived, and so did “massive understeer.” He radioed a suspected puncture and backed it up with a lurid slide into Turn 11, the Ferrari refusing to stop as normal. Piastri pounced; Hamilton improvised. Somehow, he kept it neat enough through the final sector to hang on by a whisker.
“I went into Turn 5 and it felt like I hit something, and all of a sudden I had huge understeer,” he said afterwards. “I thought I had a puncture. Braked into Turn 11 and the thing just wouldn’t stop… Somehow I managed to hold on. It was so close to Piastri coming past.”
Drama aside, fourth place does two things for Hamilton’s 2025 story. First, it matches his best Grand Prix finish since joining Ferrari. Second—and this one’s a bit bigger—it tips him over 5,000 career points, the first driver in F1 history to do it. Not a bad way to end a Sunday he spent mostly staring at the back of the other red car.
Ferrari’s day was a split screen. Charles Leclerc got the strategy he wanted, stretched the opening stint and had the pace to create a buffer. Hamilton, by contrast, was left out longer in phase one and “ended up 10 seconds behind” his teammate once the race opened up. The raw pace was encouraging, the timing less so.
“It definitely felt better today,” Hamilton said. “After P1 we kind of went the wrong way on setup and didn’t have that same pace for the rest of the weekend. Lots of positives from the race, though. Strategy left me out and it was frustrating in that respect, but it’s great points for the team.”
The Austin weekend did offer something Ferrari have been craving: a car that comes alive over a stint. In clean air, both SF-25s showed a more forgiving balance and steadier tyre life than they’ve had at a few recent stops. That counts as progress as the calendar tilts toward the final five rounds.
Hamilton knows the next step. The podium with the Scuderia remains a near-miss—“so close, but still so far,” as he put it—but his read on the trend line is optimistic. The plan now is a deep dive into setup and driving cues to unlock the last few tenths he felt go missing after Friday’s opening session.
“I’m feeling better in the car,” he said. “We’re moving in the right direction. I’ll dig into the data these next couple of days and figure out how to extract a bit more and get the car in a slightly better window. Overall, pretty decent—and the team did a great job.”
As for that final-lap mystery? Ferrari will comb through the front end. Hamilton suspected either a tyre issue or a front wing problem, but with no obvious puncture and no contact visible, it may come down to kerb strike, debris or a late-life tyre quirk that caught the balance off guard. Whatever it was, it very nearly cost him the place.
It didn’t, and the scoreboard shows what matters: a Ferrari double in the top five, Leclerc ahead, Hamilton right behind, and a seven-time champion across the 5,000-point threshold with momentum he didn’t have a month ago. A tidy haul from a messy finish. And a reminder that even on a ragged lap, Hamilton still knows exactly how to get a result over the line.
