'Sarcastic' Hamilton Exposes Frustration as Ferrari's Struggles Continue

Lewis Hamilton expressed his irritation with his Ferrari team's strategies during the Miami Grand Prix on Sunday as the Scuderia continued to face difficulties in keeping up with their competitors.

Hamilton ended up in eighth position, while his teammate Charles Leclerc secured seventh spot, leaving Ferrari still at only one podium finish this season—their lone success being Leclerc’s third-place result in Jeddah.

After requesting Leclerc to let him through, an agitated Hamilton came back with sharp remarks via the team radio.

The Briton had a spell in the race when he appeared to be driving quicker than Leclerc and clearly felt he had a better chance of closing ground on Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli.

"I’m simply spinning my tires right now, following closely behind him. Do you expect me to maintain this position for the entire race?" questioned Hamilton.

Once he was permitted to proceed, which was after three laps, Hamilton commented: "I won’t elaborate further; this isn’t proper team play. In China, I let him through without issue."

He was critical of the time it took the team to make their decisions saying: "Have a tea break while you're at it, come on!"

Once the seven-time world champion received approval to overtake Leclerc, he couldn’t manage to advance past him. With the situation flipped and Leclerc appearing quicker from behind in Monaco, the team decided to revert their positions.

Hamilton was then informed that Carlos Sainz of Williams, the former Ferrari driver, was just 1.4 seconds behind him and responded "You want me to let him past as well?"

Following the race, Hamilton stated that he had to bring up these concerns.

"I lost a lot of time behind Charles and in that moment I was thinking let’s make a concise decision and not waste time. I’m sure people didn’t like certain topics but you’ve got to understand it’s frustrating, people say way worse things than I say, it was more sarcastic than anything.

"I’m not frustrated now but we will work internally and we keep pushing," he said.

Frederic Vasseur, the Ferrari team principal, defended the thinking behind the moves and added "I can understand the frustration of the guys in the car but in the end it was well executed."

Leclerc opted for diplomacy.

"It’s a difficult situation, I think I will unfortunately go for the boring answer and I’m not going to comment too much here," he said.

"It’s obvious today is not the way we want to manage a race, we will discuss internally to make better decisions," Leclerc said. "There’s no bad feelings for Lewis, absolutely not, it’s just as a team we need to do better and today was a proof of that. For the rest I don’t want to speak more into the details."

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