Vasseur sees a lighter Lewis at Zandvoort: “Much more positive” despite Dutch GP crash
For a brief, promising spell, the old menace was back. Lewis Hamilton had the Ferrari humming around Zandvoort, shadowing Charles Leclerc in qualifying and matching the lead Mercedes on Sunday. Then Turn 3 bit. A snap at the banked Hugenholtz corner fired the SF-25 into the wall and turned Ferrari’s upswing into another DNF. But inside the garage, something shifted.
Fred Vasseur left the Dutch Grand Prix paddock talking not about damage, but about mood. And Hamilton’s, he says, finally looks different.
“We discussed after the race,” the Ferrari team boss said, “and it was much more positive than the last four or five events.” Vasseur pointed to Hamilton’s recovery from a messy Friday and his ability to run with George Russell as proof the weekend contained more than the result sheet suggested. “He lost the car, for sure, but the mood was positive. He can take a lot from the weekend and build the confidence from Zandvoort.”
It’s notable because the tone around Hamilton had gotten heavy. Hungary, just before the summer break, was flat enough to trigger whispers about whether he’d even roll into Zandvoort. He did, quiet at first, then increasingly engaged as practice evolved. Yes, there were a couple of spins on Friday. But there was also talk of a refreshed approach, and the stopwatch backed it up. Hamilton qualified within half a tenth of Leclerc — no small statement given the Monegasque’s one-lap edge this year — and the early stint pace had the pair in lockstep before Hamilton’s day ended in orange fencing.
Ferrari’s weekend, meanwhile, was almost unrecognisable between Friday and Sunday. Vasseur called the opening day “the worst Friday of the last three years,” and that didn’t feel like theatre. The car wouldn’t talk; nothing worked. Then came the reset. “Thanks to the job by the engineers, but also by the drivers — they were very cooperative — it was a very collaborative Friday evening,” Vasseur said. “We had a very good recovery on Saturday. It was not enough to fight with Mercedes, but we were not far away, and today the pace was good.”
None of it survived to the chequered flag. After Hamilton’s crash, Leclerc’s race ended in the wall as well, pitched there after contact with Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. Russell salvaged fourth for the works team, tightening the fight behind Red Bull in the Constructors’ chase. Ferrari still holds the upper hand, but Zandvoort nudged the balance in Mercedes’ favour on a day Maranello felt it had more in hand than it showed.
The Hamilton part matters because it’s been the missing ingredient since the summer. A Ferrari that’s responsive to set-up changes, a driver who’s switched on enough to drag it forward through a rough Friday, a Saturday that recalibrates the weekend — these are the beats of a functioning operation. For Hamilton, Zandvoort offered a template as much as a bruise.
There’s also the internal effect. Ferrari’s engineers got the credit from Vasseur, but so did the drivers for how they influenced the pivot. “Lewis and Charles are part of the team in that moment,” he said, drawing a line under the narrative that Hamilton’s frustration has been leaking into performance. If anything, Zandvoort looked like the opposite: an off-track reset that translated to on-track rhythm until the crash.
So the headline reads DNF, and the GIFs keep Turn 3 in rotation. But the more telling piece may be what happens next. If Hamilton’s cadence from this weekend — the method, not the mistake — carries forward, Ferrari’s ceiling lifts again. They didn’t have the legs on Mercedes outright in the Netherlands, yet the gap looked bridgeable, and not just on paper.
Nobody inside Ferrari pretends Zandvoort was good enough. But for once, it wasn’t all about what went wrong. It was about a driver who sounded like himself again — and a team that finally moved in the same direction, fast.
