‘Have I been dead slow?’ The Monaco mistakes that laid bare Hamilton’s Ferrari problems
“Are you upset with me or something?”
If good communication is at the heart of every strong relationship, Lewis Hamilton and race engineer Riccardo Adami have some work to do.
It was a message as bizarre as it was revealing. Hamilton, having toiled for a long and lonely Monaco Grand Prix to finish an unremarkable fifth, had already had several small-scale conflicts with Adami over team radio as he frustratedly attempted to make sense of his afternoon.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Get your first month for just $1. Limited time offer.
Taking the chequered flag more than a minute off the lead, Adami gave his immediate post-race reaction to his driver.
“It’s a P5,” he said. “Lost a lot of time in traffic, then the rest we need to investigate.”
Hamilton, his red mist dissipating, sought to rally the troops.
“Tough result,” he replied. “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.”
But he got no response.
Later around the lap he opened his radio again, asking if his engineer was upset with him.
Again he got no reply.
Suddenly what was a footnote-tier performance became a major talking point.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Pole and victory for Lando Norris has cut his title deficit to Oscar Piastri to just three points, and his most comprehensive performance in months could be the turning point he needs in the championship fight.
VASSEUR ‘PERFECTLY FINE’ WITH COMMUNICATION
Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur has been quick to shut down speculation about Hamilton and Adami’s working relationship this year, dismissing their sometimes clumsily radio interactions as nothing more than teething problems inevitable after a driver change.
He was against dismissive after Monaco, but this time his reasoning was far less convincing.
“When the driver is asking something between turn 1 and turn 3 we have to wait to the tunnel to reply to avoid speaking with him during the corners,” he said, per the F1 website.
“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 where we agreed before to speak with him.
“Honestly, it’s not a tension that the guy is asking something. He’s between the walls, he’s under pressure, he’s fighting, he’s at 300 kilometres per hour between the walls.
“I’m perfectly fine [with it].”
A reasonable argument except for the fact this particular radio interaction took place on the cool-down lap.
Vasseur has his reasons for being protective of Ferrari’s internal communication.
Quite apart from feeling a need to protect Hamilton — and the team — through this acclimatisation process, he’s long felt that Ferrari is unfairly targeted by the F1 broadcast team.
He made his feeling known earlier this year in China, when a series of broadcast messages appeared to suggest Hamilton was arguing against team orders to let Charles Leclerc through.
In fact Hamilton had suggested the team swap them around, recognising he was slower at the time. But that message wasn’t included in the television coverage.
“This is a joke from FOM,” Vasseur fumed at the time. “To make the show, to create the mess around the situation, they broadcast only the second part of the question.”
F1 later said it was an unintentional omission.
But for Vasseur, the damage was done because the tone had been set — that his team was poorly managing its drivers when in fact they had been collaborating well. It played into the trope of a clumsy Ferrari.
This situation, however, is different.
The full radio broadcast reveals no missing context or hidden messages.
If anything, the fullness of Hamilton’s communication with Adami appears to paint a clear picture of a partnership not yet having found its feet.
‘HAVE I BEEN DEAD SLOW THIS WHOLE RACE?’
There were several notable radio incidents throughout the grand prix.
In fact the first cropped up during qualifying, when in Q1 a slow-moving Hamilton was pinged for impeding Max Verstappen on a fast lap.
Adami had warned Hamilton of the approaching Verstappen as he crawled through Massenet, and he subsequently moved off the racing line.
But then Adami told him Verstappen was actually on a slow lap, and Hamilton moved back towards the middle of the track to resume his lap preparation — only to find the Dutchman charging up behind him on a qualifying lap.
It was arguably the defining moment of Hamilton’s weekend, with the ensuing three-place grid penalty compounding throughout the race to leave him almost a minute off the lead.
The miscommunications continued through the race.
There was the contested “this is our race” call on lap 17, the lap before Hamilton made his first pit stop.
Adami was calling on Hamilton to put his foot down to ensure he overcut Fernando Alonso and Isack Hadjar, but the Briton said after the race that he thought it meant he was in the fight for the podium.
“When I look at the data I wasn’t anywhere near any of the guys up front,” he said. “So I used up my tyres a lot in that respect, in that moment, but I was so far away from them anyway.”
That set the tone for the rest of the day.
Several times Hamilton had to remind Adami what pace he was expected to be running. Often his questions would be answered with information about other drivers but without instruction or strategy.
At one point, while lapping slow traffic, he had to ask several times how he his race was being negatively affected.
“How is this affecting my race pace?”
“How is this affecting my race, mate?”
“That was insane traffic. How much is that f***ing my race up?”
On the following lap he was told “it’s still okay”, though by then Verstappen, the only driver he had any hope of racing with, had moved up the road.
This didn’t appear to have been communicated to Hamilton, who was subsequently surprised that he was being kept up to date with his gap to the Dutchman in the final stint when Piastri was temporarily the next car up the road.
Eventually, unable to see any of his would-be rivals on the road, Hamilton asked a pertinent question.
“Have I been dead slow this whole race?”
He got no reply.
Later he asked: “Are they still nearly a minute ahead?”
In reply he was told the tyres on the podium-contending cars — though, to be fair, Adami perhaps misheard “mediums” instead of “minute”.
That was one of the last transmissions between the two before their cool-down exchange.
IT’S ALL ABOUT PERFORMANCE
It’s important to note that every driver-engineer communicates differently. It’s a crucial performance relationship, and seemingly terse words or tetchy exchanges don’t have to be indicative of any deep malaise.
Think about Verstappen’s regularly sarcastic and caustic communication with engineer Gianpiero Lambiase as an example.
And a driver can’t expected to be polite in the heat of battle. Being direct and to the point is the most efficient way to get a message across.
In that sense Hamilton’s communication shouldn’t be singled out as unusual.
Hamilton had developed a super-close bond with Peter Bonnington at Mercedes to the point each knew exactly what the other needed at any point in the race, both informationally and emotionally.
It’s unsurprising he’s not anywhere near that level of efficiency with Adami after just eight rounds — and that he’s finding it difficult after so long not having to worry about communication with his engineer.
It is, however, part of a concerning trend and indicative of his bumpy acclimatisation to Ferrari life.
They stem back to the first race, when there was a clear disconnect between him and Adami about the quantity and frequency of communication over radio.
In Japan there were further issues, with Hamilton coaching his new engineer in the kind of information he needed to improve relative to the leaders during the race.
The flashpoints were most notable in Miami, where Hamilton was assertive and at times sarcastically scathing about the Ferrari pit wall’s indecision over team orders late in the race.
Imola was a happier race, with Hamilton moving forward and praising the team, but Monaco was a regression to many of the same problems that afflicted him earlier in the year.
WHY WAS HAMILTON SLOW?
Hamilton’s own pace was as much a part of the story as his radio communication.
His finishing position, almost a minute off the leader, wasn’t just underwhelming on its own; it disappointed after what had looked like a promising start to the weekend on Friday, when he ended the day just 0.1 seconds off Leclerc.
But the wheels began falling off Saturday.
He ended FP3 in the wall after stumbling across two slow cars rounding Massenet. His car snapped from under him as they came into view exiting the blind left-hander, and he ended up crunching the barrier.
The wreckage required significant repair, most importantly to his front-right suspension and complete back suspension. He also needed a new gearbox.
The team rebuilt his car just in time for qualifying, and though he’d never access Friday’s level of performance again, it was the grid penalty picked up in Q1 that really torched his hopes of vying for the podium.
He qualified 0.319 seconds slower than Leclerc and 0.428 off pole, but that penalty dumped him from fourth to seventh on the grid.
The loss of those three places was amplified throughout the afternoon.
Hadjar and Alonso were promoted ahead of him, slowing him down from lights-out. While he overcut them — he pitted after them, using his car’s superior pace in the intervening laps to build up enough of a buffer to pit and emerge ahead of them — he was already more than 15 seconds off the lead and almost 7 seconds behind Verstappen when he entered pit lane.
Verstappen ran long, saving his first stop until lap 28. He rejoined the race 3 seconds ahead of Hamilton but with the lapped Franco Colapinto between them and several more lap-down cars ahead of them.
This is when Hamilton copped more damage.
Verstappen made quicker work of the blue-flagged drivers, so much so that by lap 34 he’d put seven slower cars between himself and Hamilton.
By the time the Ferrari driver got through the train, he was almost 32 seconds off the lead and 17 seconds adrift of Verstappen.
That’s a net loss of 17 seconds to the lead and 14 seconds to Verstappen.
How?
Blue flags are more effective at some tracks than others, but in Monte Carlo they’re particularly ineffective given there are precious few spots for lapped cars to slow down and allow the leaders through.
The problem is even worse if it’s a gaggle of lapped cars that need to give way while engaged in their own battle.
There’s also a tendency for blue-flagged drivers to make life as easy as possible for the race leader or leading pack but to be relatively less accommodating for drivers that follow some time later.
By the time Hamilton pitted at the end of lap 56, having lapped more slow cars, he’d lost another five seconds to Verstappen.
He started his final stint 44 seconds behind eventual winner Norris and 46 seconds behind Verstappen, who hadn’t yet made his final stop.
He ended the race 51 seconds behind Norris, 48 seconds behind Leclerc and 31 seconds behind Verstappen after the Red Bull Racing driver pitted on the penultimate lap.
In summary, at every stage of the race Hamilton shipped time to the leaders.
His out-of-position start realistically cost him around 10 seconds to the lead group, while traffic lost him another 17 seconds in the middle stint and another 7 seconds after his final stop.
That still leaves another 17 seconds to be accounted for in his gap to the lead — and that’s without considering how badly Norris was held up behind Verstappen on old tyres in the final stint. Really the margin should have been much larger.
To quote Adami, “the rest we need to investigate”.
In some ways Hamilton’s Monaco Grand Prix weekend was a perfect microcosm of his Ferrari season to date — some promise shown but ultimately undone by a combination of mistakes, miscommunication and a general lack of pace relative to Leclerc and the leaders.
Monte Carlo is such a specific circuit that one should always be cautious drawing too many conclusions from the weekend.
But evidently Hamilton’s rollercoaster first season with Ferrari continues.