Lewis Hamilton described his own retirement in the language a driver uses when a car is no longer fully under his control.
“The pedal just went fully to the end, so I was lucky to make it round,” Hamilton said after climbing out of his Ferrari in Madrid.
The 41-year-old had been running third and battling Max Verstappen when the pedal first went long at Turn 5 on the opening lap. He carried too much speed into the corner, brushed a barrier and pressed on. A few corners later the pedal failed again. Ferrari retired him on lap 7 of 57.
Vasseur: ‘we tried to fix it from the pit wall’
Team principal Fred Vasseur said his engineers had attempted a live fix on the SF-26 before deciding the car could not safely stay out.
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“We tried to fix it from the pit wall and then it happened again a couple of corners later,” Vasseur said.
“Staying on track made no sense in a crazy race.”
Vasseur said the team did not yet know the exact cause of the failure and would work through the system in detail before the next round. A “long pedal” of the kind Hamilton described is typically associated with a loss of hydraulic pressure, though Ferrari have not publicly identified the component at fault.
‘I had the car to fight for a win’
The retirement stung more than the average DNF because of where Hamilton believed he was heading.
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“I think we had the car to fight for a win today, and unfortunately it just didn’t work out,” Hamilton told Formula 1.
It was his first Ferrari retirement in ten months and, according to RacingNews365, his first brake-related retirement since the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix.
Title fight effectively over
Andrea Kimi Antonelli won at the Madring and pulled further clear at the top of the drivers’ standings. Hamilton had trailed the Italian by 76 points going into the weekend and afterwards conceded that his championship hopes were “all-but over”.
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix is next, on 25-27 September in Baku. Ferrari have until then to establish whether the failure was a one-off component defect or something inherent in how the SF-26 is running its brake system.
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