Hamilton hit with superlicence points and Monza grid drop after Zandvoort pre-race breach
Lewis Hamilton will arrive at Monza for his first Italian Grand Prix as a Ferrari driver with a five-place grid penalty and two fresh penalty points on his superlicence, the latest sting from a bruising Dutch Grand Prix weekend that ended in the Turn 3 wall.
The FIA has confirmed Hamilton was found in breach of pre-race procedures at Zandvoort, where Race Control imposed extra precautions on reconnaissance laps given the circuit’s layout. With the banked final corner feeding cars past the pit entry at speed, the last turn and pit-lane approach were under double-waved yellows and a “greatly reduced speed” requirement.
Stewards said telemetry showed Hamilton did slow — roughly 20kph down at the key reference point versus practice, with a 10–20% throttle cut and an earlier lift and brake by about 70 metres into the pit entry — but deemed it wasn’t enough to meet the standard of “significantly” reducing speed under double yellows or traveling at a “greatly reduced speed” in the pit entry.
Ordinarily, that package of infringements attracts a 10-place grid penalty. Mitigating his partial attempts to slow, stewards trimmed it to five. They also docked Hamilton two penalty points.
The call capped a Sunday to forget. After 22 laps, Hamilton ran wide onto the painted run-off at the banked Turn 3 and slapped the barrier, recording his first retirement of the 2025 season. Up to that moment, he felt the weekend had unlocked something.
“I’m sad for the team,” he said after climbing out. “We wanted to get those points and I honestly felt like I had the pace on the cars ahead, so I was hoping to see real progress in the race and then that happened. I feel fine mentally. Lots of positives. I felt like I was making progress. I was catching the car ahead and it’s tough to handle something like that, for sure.
“I’ve been racing for so long, I could probably count on one hand that sort of incident for me. Apart from that, it’s been a really solid weekend and we made lots of progress… so to come away with nothing is definitely painful.”
For Ferrari, it’s a double headache: a lost haul from Zandvoort and a compromised home weekend before a wheel’s turned. Monza is ruthless about track position, and a five-place penalty is the exact kind of tax you don’t want to pay at the Temple of Speed.
Still, it’s worth separating the strands. This wasn’t a case of wild driving or wheel-to-wheel overreach. It was a procedural misread on a day when the FIA had very deliberately lowered the tolerance for speed on the warm-up tour. The governing body even noted how long it took to parse the data — pulling FIA traces and requesting Ferrari’s telemetry — before handing down the decision.
The optics, though, aren’t kind. Hamilton’s Ferrari tenure has begun with more graft than gloss, and while the pace is coming, the scoreboard won’t show nuance when the tifosi pore over Saturday’s starting order. A fired-up Hamilton at Monza will be must-watch; a fired-up Hamilton starting five spots back is a different kind of show.
The task now is brutally clear. Keep the straight-line speed sharp, keep the weekend clean, and make the comeback narrative the only story by Sunday night.
