Puffing out his cheeks at the start of a series of media interviews, Lewis Hamilton grinned a smile some two-and-a-half years in the making. “Jeez, where do I start?!” he told Sky Sports’ Craig Slater, after a day under the Catalunyan sun he had long dreamed of. On a red-hot afternoon, for the first time since Mexico in October 2024, it was rich scarlet red on top of the podium once again.
Even for 41-year-old Hamilton, who has experienced and endured just about every sensation possible in his two decades in Formula One, this was something new. Something fresh. And perhaps, most tantalisingly of all, something worth building towards for the rest of the 2026 campaign.
When Hamilton told Mercedes boss Toto Wolff over lunch in February 2024 that he was moving to Ferrari, F1’s greatest modern driver probably did not envisage waiting 28 months for his first victory in red. But in Barcelona on Sunday, 686 days since his last grand prix triumph at Spa-Francorchamps, Hamilton claimed a much-deserved victory from second on the grid. Mercedes, this year’s runaway train out in front, had no answers to the galloping prancing horse.
A late virtual-safety-car (VSC) was the clincher and some may say he was the simple recipient of good fortune. They’d be wrong. Even when chasing George Russell up ahead, Hamilton’s new-and-improved Ferrari – with a staggering eight upgrades brought to this race by the Scuderia – was the fastest car on track. Without the VSC, Hamilton would likely have passed his compatriot anyway.
But in some ways, you make your own luck. Ferrari, in a change of attitude as surprising and welcoming as the emergence of a challenger to Mercedes in itself, went bold, opting for a three-stop strategy compared to Hamilton’s rivals around him going for the more routine two stops. It allowed Hamilton, so on song in recent weeks, to rip the bones out of each set of tyres. By the final stint, having left the pit-lane in front, Hamilton stormed to the chequered flag, converting a two-second lead into a 19.5-second race victory.
It was the biggest margin of victory so far this season. There was something so appropriate that the first all-British podium (alongside Russell in second and Lando Norris in third) since the 1968 US Grand Prix in Watkins Glen (featuring Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill and John Surtees) was led by one of Britain’s greatest-ever sportsmen.
And it comes just six months after Hamilton’s worst-ever F1 season, when he failed to even register a grand prix podium in his desperate first year in red. Naturally, in the aftermath, he paid tribute to those who kept him going.
“My fans really saved me through such a difficult moment last year,” he said. “Every day, I had this dream as a kid. I remember watching the red car and wondering what it’d be like to win in that car. There’s nothing like it, absolutely incredible.
“I came from quite a low place – it’s about never giving up on yourself, keep on trying.”
Ferrari’s progression in recent weeks has been massively encouraging. Barcelona, a track often used for winter testing, can give an accurate reading for the rest of the season, given its combination of high and low-speed corners. Hamilton’s pace on Sunday, not just beating Mercedes but in the end annihilating them, may mean we have a two-team championship showdown after all. After seven rounds, Hamilton trails Kimi Antonelli – the man who replaced him at the Silver Arrows and who had an unfortunate late mechanical failure on Sunday – by 41 points.
Yet to surmise that the car’s improvement is the hard-and-fast reason for Hamilton finding his feet again is altogether too simple. In fact, of more significance has been the seven-time world champion’s tinkering behind the scenes, not least an ingenious trick which has given him confidence behind the wheel once again. Intriguingly, at the same time, it has sent his teammate Charles Leclerc into a tailspin.
Hamilton revealed in Barcelona that earlier in the season, at round three in Japan, he had switched from Ferrari’s long-term brake disc supplier, Brembo, to the Carbon Industrie brakes he used during his trophy-laden years at Mercedes. These new brakes have given Hamilton the feel he craved for in the cockpit, allowing him to carry more speed into the corners with the innate knowledge that his brakes would bite as and when.
The correlation with his results – Sunday was his third consecutive top-three finish – is plain as day. “There are elements of the car that I’d asked for, and the team listened,” Hamilton said.
“There are many elements that just wouldn’t work for me with the setup that we had here and it’s taken a long time to get those things changed.” Another change which has clearly worked is Hamilton ditching his race engineer Riccardo Adami for Carlo Santi, who seemed much more in tune with his driver over team radio on Sunday.
On the flip side, the brake switch has given Leclerc – now trailing his teammate Hamilton by 40 points – a headache. Baffled by the Briton’s superiority in recent weeks, the Monegasque also switched to Carbon Industrie discs this weekend. Yet he did not have the same handling, thrusting his car into the wall in qualifying. He finished out of the points at the end of the race after, in an unrelated issue, his power steering broke.
Deep down, Hamilton won’t care a jot about his teammate’s toils. On the contrary, out of nothing, Hamilton now looks a serious contender at the top of the standings, for the first time since that memorable 2021 season. With a quick car beneath him, an inexperienced teenager at the top of the leaderboard to chase and an outlook and perspective revitalised – don’t overlook Hamilton’s satisfaction with his personal life, either, including his newfound romance with Kim Kardashian – it seems Hamilton’s long-held swansong aspiration to claim a record-breaking eighth world championship is not so far-fetched after all.
“Absolutely, this is just beginning,” Hamilton said, when asked about a title challenge. “Mercedes have an amazing package; it will take absolutely everything from all of us in this team to overcome the deficit and to get to being ahead of them consistently. But nothing’s impossible, one step at a time.”
The next two races, in Austria and his beloved Silverstone, will tell us whether Ferrari can really claim their first drivers’ championship in 19 years or whether Barcelona was a simple flash-in-the-pan. For pure curiosity, let’s hope it’s the former.
