Vasseur shrugs off ‘unsafe’ claims as Hamilton crawls home in Singapore brake drama
Lewis Hamilton’s night in Singapore ended with a crawl, a black-and-white flag, a five‑second penalty and Fernando Alonso fuming on the radio. Ferrari, for its part, insists the SF‑25 was never in a dangerous state — just painfully slow.
Hamilton was one of only three drivers to commit to a two‑stop strategy under the Marina Bay lights, bolting on fresh softs for a late chase of Kimi Antonelli for sixth. The push lasted a handful of corners. “Losing my brakes, mate,” he reported, before race engineer Riccardo Adami snapped him into full survival mode with lift-and-coast instructions. “I’ve lost my brakes, lost my left front,” Hamilton added, as the Ferrari’s rhythm unraveled.
Charles Leclerc slipped past as Hamilton tiptoed through braking zones and racked up track limits warnings. The stewards eventually flashed the black-and-white, with Alonso — who’d been half a minute back — suddenly swarming onto the Ferrari’s rear wing and letting Aston Martin know exactly what he thought of the scene. Hamilton’s woes earned him a five‑second penalty after the flag, the stewards noting a brake problem wasn’t a justifiable reason to keep leaving the circuit.
Was the car safe? Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur, speaking after the race, didn’t hesitate. “In terms of safety, yes, because we adapted pace,” he said. “It’s not that Lewis was pushing like hell in the last lap. He was 30 seconds slower. In terms of safety, it was on the safe side.” A wry smile followed: “That’s not the target. The target is to be safe, but the target is not to be 30 seconds slower.”
Adami’s countdown to Hamilton over the final laps told the story: the gap to Alonso dropping from 16 seconds to 10, then five, then two. “Don’t cut corners,” came the warning. “Ah! I’m not trying to cut corners, mate!” Hamilton snapped back, wrestling a car that didn’t want to stop.
When the dust settled, Leclerc and Hamilton — who had started seventh and sixth — finished sixth and eighth, Hamilton’s penalty confirmed. Leclerc trailed race winner George Russell by 45 seconds; Hamilton, after the time was added, was another 40 seconds further back.
Vasseur framed the entire evening as a heat-management exercise gone wrong almost from the start. “We were overheating, not from lap 1, but from lap 2 or 3,” he said. “We had to do a lift and coast of the race. Even for them, at the end, it’s not easy to drive, because you have to adapt your braking point each lap.”
In the brief windows Ferrari dared to push, the raw pace was “decent,” Vasseur reckoned. But Singapore taxes every corner entry, and once you’re chasing temperature, you’re chasing your tail. “It’s not just a matter of doing lift and coast where you are losing a little bit at the end of the straight,” he explained. “It’s also finding the right braking point — a bit more on the rear, a bit more on the front — changing the balance, and in the end you lose probably more.”
The bigger unknown is what Ferrari really had in hand compared to McLaren and Red Bull. “Honestly, I don’t know,” Vasseur admitted. “We did a couple of laps with them, but very early in the race we asked them to do lift and coast.”
As for Alonso’s charge that a car with fading brakes shouldn’t be out there, Vasseur’s stance was pragmatic: slow the car enough, and the risk profile changes. The stewards’ view was narrower — limits are limits — which is why Hamilton’s evening came with a penalty slip.
It leaves Ferrari nursing bruises and looking over its shoulder. The Scuderia trails Mercedes by 27 points in the Constructors’ standings, with Red Bull just eight back and prowling for the final step on the 2025 podium. If Singapore was a stress test of race-day cooling and brake stability in traffic, Ferrari didn’t pass it cleanly.
The upside? When Ferrari pushed for a couple of laps, the SF‑25 didn’t look lost. The downside is you don’t win much in Marina Bay on two laps of freedom and 60 of management. On nights like this, you either own the pace or you own the pain. Ferrari, and Hamilton, got the latter.
