Vasseur fumes as 10s penalty turns Hamilton–Verstappen skirmish into a Ferrari gut-punch
Mexico City promised Lewis Hamilton a red-letter day. It delivered a red card instead.
Starting third at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Hamilton made no secret he’d roll the dice to finally land his first Ferrari podium. The opening stint had all the familiar theatre: Hamilton and Max Verstappen back at it, elbows out through the first complex, a lap-six exchange that spilled over the white lines and straight into the stewards’ room. By the flag, a 10-second penalty had wrecked Hamilton’s race and reignited the debate Ferrari thought it had left behind in 2024: consistency.
Here’s what mattered. Hamilton, tucked up behind the lead pair after the long drag to Turn 1, went wheel-to-wheel with Verstappen into Turn 4. He locked up, ran off, cut across the grass and rejoined via the Turn 6 chute. He stayed ahead. The stewards deemed he’d left the track, gained a lasting advantage over Verstappen and didn’t give the place back. The “standard penalty” was applied — 10 seconds — and with it, Hamilton’s afternoon was sunk. He served it at his stop and slumped to eighth, roughly 25 seconds adrift of the podium fight that had looked very much on.
The sting? His run without a Ferrari podium now spans 20 races — a record drought for a new Ferrari signing that nobody in Maranello wants to own.
If you’re sensing a touch of exasperation in the red camp, you’re right. Team principal Fred Vasseur was pointed and, frankly, fed up.
“This cost us P4,” he said afterwards. “One thing is the penalty — for sure we didn’t follow the race director’s notes. But 10 seconds, I don’t remember when someone took 10 seconds. If you consider the global picture, Max cut the corner before, he cut the chicane in the grass, 100 metres. I think it’s not very well managed, honestly.”
The stewards, for their part, noted Hamilton’s speed meant he couldn’t follow the prescribed yellow-line rejoin path, so no breach there. The offence was simple: leave the track, gain an advantage, keep it. Penalty.
Hamilton knew it was coming the moment the car was straight. “That’s such **** man,” came the radio crackle. “The grip there is so low.” It was the sort of frustration you hear when a risk hits the paint and slides off the table.
The broader gripe from Ferrari wasn’t subtle: Verstappen skipped over the run-off at Turn 1 on lap one and later took to the escape road before Hamilton’s off, neither drawing a sanction. That asymmetry is gasoline on any post-race fire, especially when your driver’s sat through a stationary 10 seconds in the pit box because, well, Mexico. Serve a big penalty at this place and you join a DRS train that doesn’t break.
Vasseur tried to play it cooler on TV, at least stylistically. “I am not going to play the football coach and complain about everyone,” he told Canal+. Then he went right back to the point: “Ten seconds is harsh. We can consider he did not take the small way back to the track, but he also lost the car. Ten seconds is very harsh.”
You can see both sides. Mexico City’s yawning tarmac and grass cut-throughs invite drivers to go exploring. The rulebook is clear on what happens if you come back with a position you didn’t earn. But timing and context matter too, and here the context was brutal: that penalty sent Hamilton to the back of a pack he couldn’t realistically clear on pace or tyre offset. Vasseur reckons five seconds would’ve still left them P4. We’ll never know. What we do know is the stewards chose ten.
Strip away the noise and the weekend still teased something better for Hamilton. Third on the grid — behind Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc — was his best Saturday of the season, and his team-mate even admitted P3 was the sweet spot thanks to the mammoth slipstream to Turn 1. Hamilton went aggressive, the fight with Verstappen lit up, and then the stewards clipped it. Classic 2025, in a way.
Ferrari’s bigger picture remains unchanged: a car that can qualify up front, a driver still trying to break that podium duck, and a team boss who isn’t shy about calling the officiating as he sees it. The next time Hamilton and Verstappen share asphalt with nothing but white lines and judgment in between, nobody will lift.
And if you’re keeping score, Hamilton’s wait goes on. The record grows by one. The frustration grows with it.
