Who slept worst last night: Lewis Hamilton

The list is getting longer and longer. That is, the list of Formula 1 races in which Lewis Hamilton does not stand on the podium with Ferrari.

Should he succeed at some point (which I strongly assume will happen at the latest in 2026), then he will hold a record he never wanted: he will be the Ferrari driver who needed the longest to get a first podium with the team.

Sure, that is still better than the drivers who never stood on the podium with Ferrari, nevertheless that is actually unworthy of a seven-time world champion.

Speaking of unworthy, I wouldn’t describe the Brazilian Grand Prix any differently from Hamilton’s point of view. A Q2 exit, two lap-one collisions, and he gave up.

I already had another idea for this column before the race, because I don’t like to go with big names. I actually wanted to ruin Jack Doohan’s sleep, because Franco Colapinto’s new deal must have been the next punch in the gut for him.

Doohan only got six races’ time and was then temporarily replaced by the Argentinian. Temporary turned into permanent, although Colapinto’s performance was no better. But thanks to deep-pocketed sponsors, the latter will sit in the Alpine again in 2026, and Doohan knows he will never race for Alpine again – or in F1 at all.

Jack Doohan, Alpine (Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images)

But Sunday’s race brought two other candidates. One obviously was Oscar Piastri, who after the crash in the sprint lost further ground in the championship through another collision, with the title now out of his hands. But McLaren had now been the protagonist of this column four times in a row, so another solution was needed.

Lewis Hamilton delivered it on a silver platter. “It’s a nightmare. I’ve been living it for a while,” he said after the race. And whoever has a nightmare naturally cannot sleep well.

A final career dream was supposed to come true in Maranello for the seven-time world champion – a gpood one, not a nightmare. But according to his own words, he’s oscillating between the two.

On the one hand, “driving for this amazing team” is still “a dream”; on the other hand, the weekly results are that nightmare where you would rather send the sandman away, lest he sprinkles sand into your eyes again.

Sao Paulo now joins this bitter streak. A bland seventh place in the sprint was the best that Interlagos had to offer Hamilton. He twice failed to get into the third segment of qualifying; after qualifying 13th for the Grand Prix, we saw the pensive Hamilton again, who admitted that mentally he was “not great”.

And he said this: “It's another write-off weekend, I guess.”

In every language you could call this a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Hamilton was already expecting a bad Sunday, so it had to come to that.

But it actually got even worse. Basically, the Ferrari driver’s race was already over after the first corner, when he clashed with Scuderia predecessor Carlos Sainz. Well, it can happen.

But what he then tried on the main straight remains a mystery to me. That a seven-time world champion simply drives into the back of a competitor as bluntly as he did here with Franco Colapinto, I cannot comprehend.

Did he want too much after the setback in Turn 1 or had he already mentally checked out of the race again? Only he will only be able to answer that, but the fact is that the scene fits perfectly into the current picture of Hamilton at Ferrari.

The rest of his race was merely tagging along as a backmarker until the point that basically always comes when he is hopelessly outside the points: giving up.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari (Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images)

Hamilton parked his Ferrari in the garage and ended the season’s fourth-to-last race early. No podium, again.

“We don’t give up,” he stressed pathetically after the race, but he couldn’t have meant Sunday with that.

Will it get better in the last three races of the season? I have my doubts. “At this point I've just got to believe that there's something to come out from all these hardships that we've been going through,” Hamilton said. Whether he really thinks so, I have my doubts about that too.

He actually said it quite nicely: “I've got to believe.” As an external compulsion.

But if he cannot find back the inner strength that distinguished him for years at Mercedes, then the podium-less streak will get longer. And longer. And longer. And longer. And at some point, another driver will be allowed to live the (bad) Ferrari dream. Perhaps someone who drove his Haas to sixth on Sunday.