Ferrari is back

Ferrari had not won a Formula 1 race in 595 days. That drought ended in Barcelona, and it ended in the most cinematic way the sport could have written. Lewis Hamilton’s first Ferrari win arrived on the same circuit where Michael Schumacher took his own first victory in red, almost 30 years earlier and very nearly to the day. If that pairing does not give you goosebumps, check your pulse.

The win did not come from luck or attrition, though there was plenty of both around him. It came from a strategy call the rest of the grid did not see coming. With track temperatures sitting around 50 degrees and tyres surrendering far quicker than anyone wanted, Ferrari committed Hamilton to a three-stop race while Mercedes gambled on stretching two. Hamilton was in the pits as early as lap 12, and from there Ferrari simply drove away from the problem. Even Max Verstappen, who ran a three-stop of his own to fourth, admitted afterwards that Ferrari had landed on the winning strategy.

There is a longer story underneath the result, and it is the one worth paying attention to. For most of last season the relationship between Hamilton and his Ferrari pit wall looked broken, a run of crossed wires and a team that did not seem to be listening to its driver. Barcelona was the clearest sign yet that the bridge has finally been built. The Lewis effect, the idea that a seven-time champion can change how a century-old institution thinks, stopped being a talking point and started showing up on the timing screens.

Inside Hamilton’s first Ferrari win

George Russell took pole and converted it into second for Mercedes, a finish that flattered a car nowhere near Ferrari on the day. Lando Norris completed the podium for McLaren. Hamilton had qualified second behind Russell, with Kimi Antonelli third and Charles Leclerc starting all the way back in tenth after crashing in Q3 and failing to set a time.

Antonelli is the heartbreak of the weekend. The young Italian has been rewriting the record books all season and came into Barcelona with real momentum, only for his car to give out from a podium position. He still leads the drivers’ championship on 156 points, with Hamilton now up to 115, a gap of 41 with around 15 races still to run. Leclerc had a weekend to forget, a second DNF in quick succession and a crash in qualifying, and the contrast with his new teammate is becoming impossible to ignore.

Antonelli was not alone in his misery. This was a race of eight DNFs, an unusually brutal day of attrition. The cruellest belonged to Nico Hülkenberg, whose race ended on lap 29 when a single piece of gravel flicked up off the car ahead and struck his kill switch at exactly the wrong spot, shutting the car down. You could run that scenario a thousand times and never see it again.

The Gasly decision that does not add up

The other big talking point had nothing to do with Barcelona. The FIA reversed Pierre Gasly’s five-second penalty from Monaco after Alpine appealed, handing him back a third place and 15 points, while declining to reverse the same penalty for every other driver who served it, on the grounds that those penalties had already been taken. The logic does not hold together, and the precedent it sets is the real problem. McLaren and Red Bull have since appealed the appeal, with no outcome confirmed at the time of recording.

For all the chaos, the through line is patience. Schumacher won his first race for Ferrari in 1996 and did not take the title until 2000. It took him four years to turn a first win into a championship. Hamilton and Ferrari are at the very start of that same climb, and Barcelona was the day it finally began.

Austria is next, just two weeks away, and it could get even more interesting. Ferrari are understood to be bringing an engine change that may hand them a bigger boost again, and they may not be the only team to do so. Before then, there is a podium to predict. Anyone who fancies their read on a grid this unpredictable can play along with Predict the Podium and find out how they would have called a race that almost nobody got right.