Lewis Hamilton reflects on brakes, the Verstappen scrap and a missed Ferrari win in Madrid
Lewis Hamilton's Spanish Grand Prix came apart in the beginning few laps of the race. When questioned on the battle with Max Verstappen and the issues that had put him out of the race. "I just had some problems with the brakes already from Turn 5," Hamilton said. "And then I came back and then the pedal just went completely stale."
It was a compressed version of a genuinely bruising afternoon. Hamilton had qualified fourth for the first grand prix ever held at Madrid's new Madring circuit, lining up on the second row less than two tenths off Lando Norris's pole time and directly ahead of Verstappen , with Verstappen third and Charles Leclerc fifth on the same weekend's grid. He made a good start and briefly held his own against the Red Bull through the opening corners, before Verstappen was instructed to give the position back to Hamilton after running off the track and gaining an advantage on lap four.
Then, approaching Turn 5 on lap five, the brake pedal lost its bite entirely, sending him wide before it briefly returned to normal and then failed again for good. Ferrari's own broadcast caught the moment starkly, with Hamilton radioing "I can barely stop the car" as he was called into the pits and retired from the race. He had fallen as low as 19th and picked up a black-and-white flag for track limits before the end finally came.
He wasn't the only one to suffer that way. Lance Stroll had an almost identical brake failure earlier in the race, triggering the Virtual Safety Car that briefly bunched the field, while Sergio Perez also failed to finish. For Hamilton, a driver who had completed every racing lap of the 2026 season to that point, it was a rare and costly blank.
Asked what he was taking from the weekend as a whole and what needed to change at Ferrari, Hamilton was measured rather than critical. "I think the team has done an amazing job," he said. "I'm sad for them today that they couldn't get max points. I think we had the car to fight for a win today and unfortunately it just didn't work out."
That reading holds up against how the race actually unfolded. Team-mate Charles Leclerc led for much of the grand prix after staying out under the early Virtual Safety Car, before conceding the lead to Kimi Antonelli late on, eventually crossing the line fourth having tried to stretch a set of hard tyres as far as possible. It was enough to suggest Ferrari's underlying pace at Madring was closer to a win than a fourth-and-a-DNF scoreline implies, even if the maximum points Hamilton spoke of never materialised.
On the opening-lap needle with Verstappen, Hamilton was unbothered. Told the Dutchman had written off the exchange as scrappy, cartoonish racing, Hamilton simply shrugged it off: "It was pretty good racing to be honest."
The result stretches Hamilton's title picture further than it already was. Antonelli claimed his eighth win of the season to extend a championship advantage that stood at 76 points over Hamilton coming into the weekend and now sits at 101, with Hamilton third overall on 191 points and Leclerc up to fifth on 167. Whatever the pace at the new circuit suggested about Ferrari's potential, it did nothing to slow Antonelli's march towards a first title.
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