There’s no rules here.”
Lewis Hamilton finally said the quiet part out loud about Ferrari’s team orders conundrum in the 2026 Formula 1 season.
Unlike Mercedes, which got so experienced with bitter teammate fights in part thanks to Hamilton when he went up against Nico Rosberg a decade and more ago, Ferrari apparently doesn’t have a coded set of rules of engagement for its drivers to follow when racing each other.
This, if we take Hamilton’s words above in isolation, explains how the two red cars got so close to each other at the Monza race’s opening corners that Charles Leclerc ended up shoving his teammate into a gravel trap and Hamilton losing six places on a day Ferrari had previously hoped to win.
It’s something that shouldn’t need to be codified at any team, as the number one rule for any driver is: “Don’t hit your teammate.” Right after, “Don’t lose to your teammate.” And therein lies Ferrari’s problem.
The tension between this pair seeped out at Zandvoort last month, when Leclerc ignored a team call to pit when Hamilton was bearing down with fresher, faster tires. And it boiled over at Monza.
But not just in those critical two opening corners, where Leclerc’s driving left Hamilton vowing, “We’re definitely going to have it on after the race.”
Presumably Leclerc will have pointed out he encountered a severe bout of understeer — where a car’s front wheels don’t turn as fast as a driver wants — following early leaders Pierre Gasly and George Russell so closely that he went wider than he surely meant at Turn 2. But Leclerc should’ve expected that too.
“We’re at a point in the year where 59 points (76 after he finished sixth at Monza and Kimi Antonelli won again) is a huge deficit to recover from,“ Hamilton had said of his slim title chances after qualifying. ”So we do have to work as a team.”
Leaving Monza, Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur said, “Now we have time to discuss with the guys” changing how they go racing, when before, per the Frenchman, “it was too early to take a decision before Monza.”
But this is never a simple task, and Ferrari’s role in changing a long-accepted F1 norm has made it harder.
Just three months ago, it signed Leclerc to a deal that is expected to keep him at the team until the 2030s, a stint that would make him, by far, the most experienced Ferrari F1 driver (he’s currently 17 behind Michael Schumacher’s 180-race record, with the catch set to occur in mid-2027). McLaren has since done the same with Lando Norris, and Red Bull with Max Verstappen.
Ferrari, and its rivals, cannot muzzle and hold back the driver it still sees as its long-term future. Not only does this risk making Leclerc even more erratic than he has been this year, but the maths doesn’t support it.
Leclerc is, after all, still mathematically in contention to win this year’s championship.
As an aside, imagine the outcry there would be from Leclerc fans if Ferrari had told him to back up Hamilton.
Post-Zandvoort, Hamilton felt the need to atone for his team radio comments there. These were pretty innocuous in the grand scheme of things, but were hanging as a PR headache for Ferrari heading to its home race. An Instagram statement was duly forthcoming.
But another sign of these very different times — in previous generations fans obviously couldn’t send their fury directly to team and driver social media accounts — is Leclerc’s contract again.
When Schumacher signed to race for Ferrari in 1996, his contract made it clear he had priority (in terms of equipment and strategy calls) over the other Ferrari driver.
But, Red Bull and its prioritizing of Verstappen aside, such an approach is a relic for modern teams. Now, they want their drivers locked down for a long time to help impress investors and sponsors amid the swell of interest in F1, which has sent team valuations skyrocketing.
A long-term driver star that can bank the team ever more merchandise cash as well as points is a big part of this. And Ferrari has signaled so hard that, right now, this is Leclerc.