Hamilton was chasing Liam Lawson for seventh when the São Paulo track flipped from damp to drenched inside a single lap on Sunday. He spun on the approach to Turn 1 as rain intensified, scraped his rear wing on the barriers and dropped out of the points, finishing ninth a lap behind race winner Lando Norris.

What has stuck with the seven-time world champion is not the weather but what he had been told to expect on the Ferrari radio.

“They said the previous lap is gonna stay consistent like this, and so I was like, OK, I can stay out in this. And just before the pit lane entry, they said, ‘Box box’, and I was just behind Lawson, so I just pressed overtake, and I thought the conditions were staying the same. And then I get to Turn 1, and it’s drenched, and so I didn’t get that information,” Hamilton told reporters in Brazil, according to PlanetF1.

Catching Lawson, then losing the car

In the greasy phase just before the rain stepped up, the Ferrari was the quicker car on the road. Hamilton was running with Lawson’s Racing Bulls and had been eating into the gap in long sweeps of a second a lap.

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“It was so gutting because honestly, in those greasy conditions, I was quicker than Lawson. I was catching him like a second a lap,” Hamilton said.

The spin wasted a recovery drive from 20th on the grid, where he had started after a power-unit penalty. He reached the finish a lap down in ninth, one place behind Charles Leclerc, who was dropped from seventh to eighth after a five-second penalty for a collision with Lawson.

Latest knock in a difficult first Ferrari year

The missed call lands in a season Hamilton has openly called a “nightmare”. He has yet to score a podium in red, and before Brazil his week had already produced another Ferrari flashpoint, with team principal Fred Vasseur holding a clear-the-air meeting involving Hamilton and Leclerc in São Paulo after their Mexico clash. Hamilton told Autosport in Brazil that the tensions had been “squashed”.

The contrast at Interlagos was sharp. Mercedes, the team Hamilton left over the winter, sealed its first constructors’ title since 2021 as George Russell finished fourth and Kimi Antonelli fifth, a week after Antonelli clinched the drivers’ championship in Mexico City.

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The next round is the Las Vegas Grand Prix, with lights out on Saturday 21 November at 8pm local time on the Strip Circuit.

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