Ferrari respond to Alonso claim after Lewis Hamilton radio rant

Fred Vasseur dispelled any notion that Lewis Hamilton’s SF-25 was in an unsafe condition in the closing laps of the Singapore Grand Prix, adamant it was safe because he slowed down.

Hamilton was one of only three drivers to adopt a two-stop strategy at the Marina Bay circuit and used his fresh soft Pirellis to try to hunt down Kimi Antonelli for sixth place.

Lewis Hamilton: ‘I’ve lost my brakes, lost my left front’

But as he closed in on the Mercedes driver, he told his race engineer, “losing my brakes, mate”. Told by Riccardo Adami to “lift and coast”, Hamilton added: “I’m losing big time. I’ve lost my brakes, lost my left front.”

His teammate Charles Leclerc overtook the Briton who was struggling to stay on the track, incurring one track limit violation after the other as Fernando Alonso, who had been 30 seconds behind him, closed in on the Ferrari driver’s rear wing.

Heading into lap 61 of the 62-lap race, Adami informed Hamilton the gap was down to 16 seconds, then 10, five and two seconds.

Adami warned Hamilton not to cut corners, but the frustrated Briton replied: “Ah! I’m not trying to cut corners, mate!”

But as his struggles continued, he was shown the black-and-white flag with Alonso angered by the situation.

Repeating raging, “I cannot f***ing believe it”, he told Aston Martin: “Is it safe to drive with no brakes? Five seconds, minimum!

“For me, you cannot drive when the car is not safe, you know. Sometimes, they try to disqualify me with no mirror, and now you have no brakes, and everything is fine? I doubt it.”

His prediction came to pass as Hamilton was given a five-second penalty by the race stewards, who said that while he was battling a brake issue, that “was not a justifiable reason” for going off the track.

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It does, however, raise the question about whether Hamilton’s Ferrari was in a safe enough condition to be out on track.

Vasseur insists it was, given that the driver had slowed his pace.

“We all know that Singapore, when you are in the middle of the pack, it’s difficult for the brakes,” he told the media at the Marina Bay circuit.

Asked if the situation was always under control in terms of safety, the team principal insisted: “In terms of safety, yes, because we adapted pace.

“It’s not that Lewis was pushing like hell in the last lap. He was 30 seconds slower. In terms of safety, it was on the safe side.

“That’s not the target,” he added with a chuckle. “The target is to be safe, but the target is not to be 30 seconds slower.”

Leclerc and Hamilton, who qualified seventh and sixth respectively, finished the race sixth and eighth with the Monegasque driver 45 seconds down on race winner George Russell as he too had overheating issues. Hamilton, after his penalty was applied, was a further 40 seconds down.

Vasseur revealed both drivers had problems almost from the very first lap of the 62-lap grand prix.

“We were overheating, not from lap 1, but from lap 2 or 3,” he said. “We had to do a lift and coast of the race.

“Even for them, at the end, it’s not easy to drive, because you have to adapt your braking point each lap.

“Clearly, when we pushed a couple of laps with Lewis, I think the pace was decent. But you can’t do 95 per cent of the race on the back foot and doing management.”

Asked if Ferrari’s race pace would’ve been comparable to McLaren and Red Bull had both drivers not had issues, Vasseur replied: “Honestly, I don’t know. I think we did a couple of laps with them, but then you don’t know.

“Very early in the race we asked them to do a lift and coast.

“It’s not just a matter of doing lift and cost where you are losing a little bit on the end of the straight, is also finding the right braking point and all the race we are a bit more, a bit less, a bit more, a bit less, a bit more on the rear, a bit more on the front, you have to change the right balance, and at the end that you lose probably more.”

Ferrari trails Mercedes in the Constructors’ Championship by 27 points while Red Bull is now just eight away from booting the Scuderia off the F1 2025 podium.

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