“I can’t brake.”

That was the last message Lewis Hamilton sent his Ferrari pit wall on Sunday before parking the SF-26 at the new Madring circuit. What began as a strange step in the pedal on the opening lap turned, a few corners later, into a pedal that ran all the way to the floor, leaving the seven-time world champion with no way to slow the car short of a barrier.

Hamilton had qualified fourth and had moved up to third when the trouble started at Turn 5.

“Braking for Turn 5 I hit the brake, the car started stopping and then the pedal took a step and all of a sudden the car didn’t de-accelerate as fast as normal,” Hamilton told Formula 1.

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“I ended up carrying a lot of speed in and just brushed the barrier.”

The pedal returned briefly. Then it went for good.

“And then all of a sudden the pedal just went fully to the end, so I was lucky to make it round,” he told Motorsport.com.

Ferrari brought him in on lap 7. Team principal Fred Vasseur said the pit wall had tried to work around the fault before deciding it was not safe to keep him out on a street layout hemmed in by concrete walls.

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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. We didn’t want to take any risk.”

Streak ends on lap seven

Before Madrid, Hamilton was the only driver on the 2026 grid still to have completed every racing lap of the season. That run, at the age of 41, ended on the seventh lap of the new Spanish circuit.

Ferrari has not given a public root cause for the intermittent failure. Hamilton was left guessing too.

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“I don’t really know where that’s come from,” he said.

Antonelli 101 points clear

Kimi Antonelli won the race from the front row and left Madrid on 292 points. Hamilton, third overall on 191, is 101 points behind the Mercedes driver with the Singapore Grand Prix next on the calendar.

Hamilton’s own reading of Sunday, before the pedal went, was that “we had the car to fight for a win today, and unfortunately it just didn’t work out.”

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