Ferrari’s radio asked for choreography. Baku gave them a blooper reel.
In the dying seconds of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton was told to hand back eighth place to Charles Leclerc after an earlier switch had let the Brit chase the pack ahead on fresher tyres. Hamilton lifted, moved off-line on the monster main straight, checked his mirrors… and still beat Leclerc to the flag by a shade under four tenths. Cue awkward debrief.
The set-up to the mix-up was classic Baku. Ferrari’s Sunday was already scruffy: Hamilton was a surprise Q2 exit, Leclerc crashed in Q3, and both cars spent the race in the long, thin queue that defines the streets along the Caspian. Leclerc, managing an energy recovery issue, moved aside earlier to let Hamilton try his luck against Lando Norris, Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson. When the push didn’t bite, Ferrari called for the places to be reversed before the line.
Hamilton tried to comply. But the other red flag in his mirrors wasn’t a Ferrari — it was Isack Hadjar, hovering at roughly two seconds back. On Baku’s absurdly long run to the finish, that proximity turns a simple swap into a threading-the-needle job at 300kph.
Bernie Collins, the former McLaren performance lead and Aston Martin strategy chief, spotted that exact wrinkle on the world feed radio. Hamilton was reminded Hadjar sat two seconds behind Leclerc; Leclerc was told to expect the switch on the main straight. That’s a tight window with DRS in play and the timing line lurking late.
“He’s trying to let one guy by, but not the guy only two seconds behind him,” Collins noted on Sky. “It’s a very, very difficult thing to judge… I think that’s possibly why he’s got it ever so slightly wrong.”
Leclerc, who’s been through his fair share of team-order turbulence in scarlet, downplayed any drama but couldn’t help pointing out that “the rules were not respected” in that moment. Hamilton apologised to his teammate after the flag.
From the pit wall, Fred Vasseur treated it as a miscue, not malice. “The situation was clear,” the Ferrari team boss said. “Lewis had a tyre advantage and we asked Charles to let him go to try to overtake Lawson and Tsunoda or Norris. Charles also had an issue with the recovery. We asked to swap back and it looks like Lewis had a misjudgement on the position of the start and finish line.”
It’s an easy error to make at this circuit: the timing line sits so far down the straight that drivers sometimes bleed off too much, too early, or not enough, too late. Throw in a rookie with nothing to lose tucked just behind and you’re playing chess on ice.
The bigger sting for Ferrari wasn’t the optics of team orders, it was that they were fighting over the rations. An eighth-and-ninth kind of Sunday always feels heavier when your Friday looked like a dress rehearsal for something better — Hamilton topped practice in a Ferrari one-two, only for the weekend to unravel as the grip came up and the field sharpened.
There is, however, a silver lining if you squint through the smog of Baku’s endless back straight: Hamilton’s raw pace relative to Leclerc continues to firm up. Williams development driver and Sky pundit Jamie Chadwick framed it neatly. “Lewis had very good performance relative to Charles,” she said. “That’s important for the Constructors’ battle — you need two drivers up there fighting.”
That’s the subtext to all of this. The fight for second in the teams’ standings is a knife-edge affair and wildly sensitive to whether your second car is in the points, in the top six, or nowhere. One weekend of double scores swings momentum; one weekend of damage limitation hands it back. Ferrari know this, Mercedes know this, and Red Bull — yes, Red Bull — are close enough to punish any hesitation.
Hamilton’s frustration will be twofold. He looked the sharper Ferrari around Baku’s walls, and it amounted to a scrap over minor points rather than a shot at the podium freight train up ahead. Still, there’s enough evidence from recent rounds to suggest his adaptation curve in red is bending the right way — and he won’t be the last driver to misread Baku’s chequered-line geometry with a car looming in the slipstream.
Inside the garage, this one gets filed under “lessons learned”: make the call a lap earlier, pick a safer spot, and don’t leave a two-second shark in the same pool. Outside it, the picture remains the same. Ferrari have two very fast drivers, a car that’s moody over a weekend, and a championship scrap that punishes any hesitation.
They tried to script the finish. Baku, as usual, went off-book.
