Lewis Hamilton has explained, in unusually blunt detail, why the early months of his Ferrari chapter were spent in survival mode rather than in full attack.
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring, the seven-time world champion confirmed that a heavy testing crash with Ferrari at Barcelona early last year left him nursing a neck injury that lingered deep into the opening phase of the 2025 season.
“I hit the wall very hard last year in testing, knocked out one of the discs in my neck, protruded into the nerve,” Hamilton said. “Couldn’t do a lot for nine weeks. I was just having chiropractors every day, physio every day, I couldn’t sleep, I was on painkillers, I had to get injections. I did everything I could to try to fix it.
“That’s what I was basically trying to live with. It’s not easy in the seat position that you’re sitting in.”
The incident itself dates back to January 29, 2025, during Hamilton’s second on-track outing as a Ferrari driver. After his Fiorano debut, Ferrari shifted its preparations to a Testing of Previous Car run at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya using the team’s 2023 chassis. Hamilton’s accident came in the high-speed final part of the lap and, beyond the physical toll, it disrupted Ferrari’s programme as repairs ate into track time.
Hamilton had already hinted at the problem earlier this month, after finally putting a two-year winless streak behind him with a record-extending 106th career victory — a win that also happened to come at Barcelona, of all places. He said then that he’d been dealing with an injury “for months” during 2025; in Austria he’s now put a name and a timeline on it: a slipped disc and nine weeks of trying to function like a normal human, never mind an F1 driver.
And that context matters, because Hamilton’s 2025 season reads strangely on paper. The move to Ferrari was the biggest driver transfer in modern times; the results that followed were some of the bleakest of his career. No podiums all year. A sprint win in China that stood out like a flare in the dark. A lot of weekends where Hamilton sounded as if he was still learning where the edges were — not just of the car, but of what his body could tolerate.
If Hamilton’s nine-week estimate is accurate, the worst of it would have overlapped with his first races in red. His Ferrari debut in Australia was scrappy: he qualified two tenths off Charles Leclerc and then slid to 10th in a rain-affected race. That weekend, it’s believed, Ferrari also became alert to a fundamental ride-height issue on the SF-25 that would force compromises and cost performance.
A week later in China, Hamilton delivered what looked like a statement — pole and the sprint win — only for the Sunday to unravel. He was disqualified from the Grand Prix for excessive plank wear, a breach tied to the very ride-height problem Ferrari was trying to navigate. Worse, the disqualification came after a race in which Hamilton struggled for pace anyway, while Leclerc was quicker despite carrying a broken front wing. Leclerc’s own Sunday ended in disqualification too, with his car found to be underweight.
That one-two punch — an uncomfortable physical recovery and a car that, at key moments, wasn’t giving either driver what they needed — goes some way to explaining why Hamilton’s first season at Maranello never found the momentum his arrival promised.
The neck is one of those areas where racing drivers can’t bluff. It’s not just about enduring G-loads in high-speed corners; it’s about what the neck does for stability and control, and how quickly a small issue turns into a bigger one once you’re strapped into a cockpit for hours, week after week. Hamilton’s description of daily treatment, painkillers, injections and the inability to sleep is about as far from the glamour of a blockbuster transfer as you can get.
There’s a grim historical resonance to it, too. Michael Schumacher — the only other seven-time world champion — suffered a severe neck injury in a 130mph motorcycle accident in 2009. It ended his planned F1 return that year when Ferrari needed a stand-in after Felipe Massa’s accident, and many have argued the after-effects shaped the limitations of his later Mercedes comeback. Different circumstances, different injuries, but the same lesson: when your neck goes, your season can go with it.
Hamilton is 41 now, in 2026, and still doing the hardest part of elite sport: resetting expectations without lowering standards. The Barcelona win earlier this month didn’t just end a streak; it changed the temperature around him. It also cast last year in a different light. When a driver of Hamilton’s calibre says he spent nine weeks barely able to sleep, it forces you to recalibrate how you read the weekends that followed — not as a superstar suddenly “finding it tough”, but as someone turning up and doing the job at less than full capacity.
Austria, then, becomes less about another chapter in the Leclerc-versus-Hamilton intra-team tally and more about whether Hamilton can now build on a moment of release in Spain, with his body no longer dictating his ceiling.
The speed is still there; Barcelona proved that. The question, as ever with Hamilton, is what happens once he’s got a little bit of air.
