Lewis Hamilton’s run to fifth place at the 2025 Monaco Grand Prix meant, combined with Charles Leclerc’s combative second place, Ferrari took home its biggest points haul from a single event so far this season - but alongside that collective success was another difficult weekend individually for Hamilton.
He didn’t share Leclerc’s pre-event pessimism about Ferrari’s apparent low-speed weakness from earlier races hurting its chances around the Monte Carlo streets, but where Leclerc found an immediate groove with what turned out to be a much more competitive car than he expected, Hamilton always looked a step or two behind his team-mate.
The closest Hamilton came was a tenth adrift of Leclerc after FP2 on Friday. That gap grew to half a second in FP3, before Hamilton crashed, and come qualifying Hamilton was always three tenths behind as Leclerc battled Lando Norris for pole position.
And the race was worse still.
A three-place grid penalty for impeding Max Verstappen at Massenet in Q1 made Hamilton’s life harder. That meant he spent the first 16 laps bottled up behind Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls and Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin until they each pitted out of his way.
This immediately cost Hamilton 12 seconds of race time relative to Leclerc.
But once in clear air and then able to overcut his way past those two slower cars, how to explain that 12s gap ballooning to 48s come the chequered flag?
Hamilton himself was at a loss, and seemed to bristle when Sky Sports F1’s Natalie Pinkham tried to get him to explain in the TV pen afterwards.
NP: Can you explain that 45-second gap between you and those at the front?
LH: Nope.
NP: Kind of crazy to see that…
LH: Not really, it happens.
NP: Yeah, but do you know why?
LH: Nope.
It’s not unusual for Hamilton to withdraw in the immediate aftermath of a difficult race, particularly if he finds the line of questioning hostile.
The best we got from him between that and his media pen interview with other media, including The Race, was that he’d felt “stuck in no man’s land”, had received radio communication that “wasn’t exactly that clear”, and overall had a “not great” weekend.
This wasn’t Lewis at his most enlightening, but it’s also rare that he ever is so soon after races - particularly when they haven’t gone well.
What was clear - at least to those who stuck around long enough to watch Sky Sports F1 broadcast it in the later part of its post-race broadcast - was Hamilton having another awkward radio exchange with his new Ferrari race engineer Ricciardo Adami.
But whereas past flashpoints this season have tended to follow a pattern of Hamilton being demanding of different information over team radio in the heat of battle, this time it was Adami’s silence that seemed to catch Hamilton off guard.
Firstly, there was a brief exchange between them as the race neared its conclusion.
LH: Are they still nearly a minute ahead?
RA: Charles on medium and McLarens on hard, in [Turn] 16, very close to each other fighting.
LH: You're not answering the question. It doesn't really matter, I guess. I was asking if I’m a minute behind or…?
RA: He [Leclerc]’s 48 seconds [ahead].
After Hamilton makes the finish there is another exchange, which ends with Hamilton asking an awkward question and receiving no reply at all.
RA: It's a P5. Lost a lot of time in traffic. The rest we need to investigate. And pick up [tyre marbles], please.
LH: Yeah, big thank you to the boys, as I said, for fixing the car. It’s not been the easiest of weekends, but we live to fight another day, so… yeah.
[A short time passes]
LH: Are you upset with me or something?
[No answer]
Of course we need to be careful about reading too much into snapshots of radio communications between team and driver, but this stood in stark contrast to the sort of geeing up that used to happen between Hamilton and Pete Bonnington at Mercedes.
Even after particularly difficult races, Bonnington would usually have something to say in response to Hamilton’s immediate summary at the end of a grand prix.
The nature of the radio communication between Hamilton and Adami got thrust into an instant spotlight because of how naturally difficult their first race together in Australia was in changeable conditions.
Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur doesn’t enjoy answering questions on this topic, because he feels it creates controversy where none truly exists, and he was again in ‘play it down’ mode when asked about Adami’s radio silence after Monaco.
“When the driver is asking something between Turn 1 and Turn 3 we have to wait the tunnel to reply to avoid speaking with him during the corners,” Vasseur said.
“It's not that we are sleeping, it's not that we are having a beer on the pit wall! It’s just because we have a section of the track when we agreed before to speak with him.
“And honestly, it's not a tension that the guy is asking something, he's between the wall, he's under pressure, he's fighting, that he's at 300kph between the walls and I'm perfectly fine.
“When I spoke with him after the race, he was not upset at all.”
Most of that answer, though, was in fact irrelevantly deflecting towards Ferrari’s general communication plan for the highly specialised demands of Monaco, in terms of not speaking to the driver at certain points around the track so as to mitigate the risk of unintentionally breaking their concentration at a crucial moment.
We often hear drivers complain ‘don’t speak to me in the corners!’ - and this is particularly important around Monaco, where there’s basically no margin for error.
The real point here is that Hamilton was on a slowing down lap after the race, was speaking to his engineer, getting no response, and then getting no response again when asking him a direct question about “being upset with me”.
At least we can glean from Vasseur’s answer that whatever upset there might have been, it was at least apparently cleared up in the time between that radio exchange happening and Vasseur giving his post-race media briefing.
So that clears up the trivial business - but what about the lingering question of Hamilton’s clear underperformance: the bit, as Adami put it, that "we need to investigate".
Vasseur accounts for another 10s of the remaining 36s gap between Hamilton and Leclerc at the finish by saying Hamilton (running in his self-proclaimed no man’s land) was held up worse by lapped cars that were more inclined to leap out of the way for the Verstappen/Norris/Leclerc/Piastri lead group.
Vasseur called this a “difficult time” for Hamilton - a description which might in truth also apply to the vast majority of his 2025 season so far.
And although Hamilton is a three-time winner at Monaco, he doesn’t yet know Ferrari’s car the way Leclerc does - “like the back of his hand”, as Hamilton put it.
“It’s a much, much different car driving here than I've had in the last 12 years,” said Hamilton after qualifying, describing the through-corner balance, ride quality, mechanical settings and engine behaviour of the Ferrari as “very different” to what he became used to at Mercedes.
“It takes a bit to get used to,” he added. “This weekend it's been a bit of a steep learning curve.”
And a clear demonstration of the potential of even this difficult Ferrari in his team-mate's hands.
