Lewis Hamilton left Monza with a public grievance and a widening gap. Ferrari’s seven-time champion finished sixth at his team’s home race on Sunday, 24.655 seconds behind winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli. That result has left Hamilton third in the drivers’ standings on 191 points, 76 points behind Antonelli’s 267 with eight rounds left.

Charles Leclerc did not add a point. The Monegasque lost his Ferrari on lap 2 at the Parabolica, pitching the car into the barriers and prompting a red flag that stopped the race for around half an hour. Ferrari’s home weekend was over almost before it had begun, and the disappointment came only a fortnight after Zandvoort, where the team also left without a serious answer to Mercedes.

Hamilton takes aim at the top

“Ultimately, it comes from the top. It trickles down the decisions, and so it starts with Fred,” Hamilton said, naming team principal Fred Vasseur.

“I’ve come into the team and tried to be respectful of space and definitely not put the team in jeopardy,” Hamilton said in the same briefing.

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“We’ve got to change things, because this is not helping us to move forward.”

Hamilton conceded there is only so much a driver can do from inside the cockpit, referring to his own ability to change Ferrari as “shout from the mountain top.” He said the conversation he had wanted with the team would probably now wait until after Madrid.

Vasseur under pressure again

Vasseur has been in this position before. Ferrari chairman John Elkann said last month that he wanted to “express our full confidence in our Team Principal, Fred Vasseur, and in the work he is carrying out together with all our colleagues at Scuderia Ferrari,” according to ESPN’s reporting, and a contract extension had already been announced in the summer.

Monza has re-opened every question about how Ferrari is run. According to The Race, which laid out Ferrari’s choices in detail this weekend, Christian Horner, the former Red Bull team boss now free to return to Formula 1 after a settlement with his old employer, has previously turned down an approach from Elkann. Ferrari has denied any active talks.

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The three levers The Race identifies as still available to Ferrari are the start procedures that have hurt the team in two of the last three races, the engine calibration Ferrari has been running conservatively for reliability, and the absence of any team rule for how Hamilton and Leclerc are supposed to race each other.

Hamilton’s public frustration is aimed most obviously at the third of those. Leclerc, whose long-term Ferrari contract was extended before Hamilton arrived, has no reason of his own to accept a hierarchy, and Vasseur has so far declined to impose one.

Vasseur admits Ferrari ‘failed’ the fans

The maths is not yet fatal. Hamilton is still ahead of Lando Norris on 171 points and Leclerc on 155, and Ferrari is not out of the constructors’ picture. But Antonelli has stretched the lead at almost every race since the summer break, and his 66-point advantage over Mercedes team-mate George Russell is already close to three grand prix wins.

The next round is the inaugural race at the new MADRING circuit in Madrid on 13 September, and Ferrari has six days to decide whether Monza forces a change in how the team goes racing. Vasseur, according to The Race, has already acknowledged that Ferrari “failed” the fans at Monza.

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