Hamilton caught sight of the back of Leclerc’s car around a third of the way into Sunday’s race at Marina Bay. By lap 27, with both Ferraris on softs, Hamilton was close enough to his teammate to tell the pit wall he was losing time.
A lap later he asked for the garage to do something about it. “I need to use this speed, mate,” Hamilton said over the radio, offering to let Leclerc back through if he could not get the move done himself.
Ferrari did not give him what he wanted. The team told Hamilton to look after his rubber: “We need tyre management in Turns 10 and 18, for tyres and performance.” Watching on Sky Sports F1, Martin Brundle called it “absolutely not the response that Hamilton wanted.”
Leclerc kept pulling away in front of him. He set the fastest lap on lap 28, and by lap 36 his advantage over Hamilton was back out past two seconds, undoing the ground Hamilton had made up when both cars switched to the softer compound.
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A quieter rerun of Zandvoort
Hamilton has been through this with Ferrari before. At the Dutch Grand Prix in August, he grew visibly frustrated when the pit wall refused to swap him with a slower Leclerc, and afterwards contrasted Ferrari’s hesitation with the way Mercedes manages its two drivers.
“I’m here to win and it is difficult when you’re looking ahead and you see the two Mercedes drivers, they get the call and it’s done, they execute straight away,” Hamilton said after Zandvoort.
Before the Singapore weekend he had publicly set the tone the other way. “As a team we need to do whatever it takes to win,” Hamilton told Sky Sports F1 at Marina Bay.
Leclerc, speaking in the same build-up, had already warned the garage would have to make a call once the lights went out.
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“In terms of strategy we will have to look, but it’s also true whoever is behind after the first lap, if that happens, the second car can lose a lot, whether that’s Lewis or me,” Leclerc told Sky Sports F1.
“That’s a team choice and something we will discuss. If a win is on the table we will have to take a decision.”
Antonelli still clear in the standings
The internal Ferrari argument is playing out against a title fight that is slipping away from both drivers. Kimi Antonelli, in his second Mercedes season, has turned the 2026 championship into a one-man race. Heading into the Singapore weekend, the Italian led teammate George Russell by 84 points, with Hamilton third on 214 and Leclerc fourth on 191.
Antonelli stretched that advantage to 89 points over Russell with fourth place in Saturday’s rain-hit Marina Bay sprint, which Max Verstappen won ahead of Hamilton and Leclerc.
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The next chance for Ferrari to redraw its internal protocol is the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas on 25 October.
