BARCELONA — Lewis Hamilton had a massive smile etched on his face.The seven-time world champion looked down from the top of the podium on Sunday as a melody of voices shouted the Italian national anthem. At one point, he wiped his eye with his towel. This was a moment that had been a long time coming.It had been nearly 600 days since a Ferrari driver had won a grand prix, but then came Hamilton, producing one of his finest performances to win Sunday’s Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.
Ferrari on song 🎶🎵🇮🇹🎵🎶#F1 #BarcelonaGP pic.twitter.com/PgtIjkLUmP
— Formula 1 (@F1) June 14, 2026Mercedes has dominated this season, sweeping every pole position and winning all six races, five of which by the team’s Italian 19-year-old driver.When it came to pace, Mercedes held a multi-second gap over the rest. But that changed in Barcelona. Not because of a silver bullet, or the eight upgrades Ferrari brought to the track. “It’s not that today everything is magic, and last week it was not,” team principal Fred Vasseur said.But this was a significant result, one that came down to getting the details, the strategy right.Does it mean Ferrari will be regularly challenging Mercedes for the rest of the season? Perhaps not just yet.Following his sixth-place finish in the Miami Grand Prix last month, Hamilton said he didn’t plan to go on Ferrari’s simulator ahead of the Canadian GP taking place later in May, opting for a different approach “because the way we’re preparing at the moment is not helping.”He went on to secure consecutive second-place finishes, at Montreal and Monaco. Mercedes was still dominant. “I think it’s going to be tough to beat Mercedes,“ Hamilton told reporters on Thursday.But if Mercedes ever made a mistake, Hamilton — three podium finishes to his name before Sunday — looked like a safe bet to capitalize.Hamilton’s first year with Ferrari in 2025 was one to endure. Despite the preseason hype, he failed to finish on the podium during a season for the first time in his career, and teammate Charles Leclerc out-performed him.He reset coming into this season and multiple changes happened in the background, including swapping his race engineer and training harder than he had before. Unlike last season, he could also have input into the car.Coming into Barcelona, Hamilton felt things were moving in the right direction but also said the team had more to come.“We’ve got more improvements to make,” he said. “We exist to win, and we don’t exist to win by default for someone else. We exist to win through pure performance and earning it, and that’s what we’re working towards.”That came on Sunday, but it wasn’t always clear the weekend would end so triumphantly.Lewis Hamilton and Fred Vasseur embrace after the race. (Clive Rose / Getty Images)Hamilton watched from the sidelines during Friday’s first practice session while Dino Beganovic fulfilled one of the team’s mandatory rookie practice sessions. The Briton mentioned Saturday how he “really struggled to get on pace,” adding, “I’ve never been so down before in a sense of the gap between Charles and I and to everybody else.”He left the track between third practice and qualifying and went to his motorhome. “I was just on the engineer call, just on my phone, but I kind of went where I had a bit of a reset,” he said. “Came back and I was able to somehow get back on it. So yeah, whatever it did, it worked.”Some adjustments were made, and Hamilton felt more confident in the car, particularly the rear, come qualifying. And the confidence showed, as just 0.064 seconds separated him and pole sitter George Russell.But he also credited the team for helping him get into the best position to challenge Mercedes for the victory. He noted how, “this is the closest we’ve been pace-wise, I think, in quali.”Even Vasseur pointed out Sunday how Hamilton was able to contend for pole position against Russell and Antonelli.“We kind of know where our North Star is and for them to bring this upgrade here this weekend, I can’t thank them enough for the hard work that they’ve put in to bring it,” Hamilton said Saturday.Ferrari’s Sunday showed how small details matter in the big moments.Hamilton embarked on an ambitious three-stop strategy on a day when the paddock saw more tire degradation than we had seen so far this season. He was the first to pit, on Lap 11, and the virtual safety cars played in his favor, particularly Fernando Alonso’s over halfway through, on Lap 41.Tire degradation and strategy played key roles in Barcelona. Vasseur highlighted how hotter conditions in Spain were an extreme and the next race, in Austria at the end of the month, likely will see more average conditions.It can become easy to be caught up in the moment, particularly when it’s as significant as Hamilton’s first victory in red — 30 years on from Michael Schumacher’s first Ferrari victory at this same track.But Hamilton’s pace in qualifying and the grand prix does raise the question of whether Ferrari could contend more regularly against Mercedes.“We know we have this power deficit,” Hamilton said Sunday. “There’s going to be tracks where we go to with long, long straights where that makes it even harder.“But, as I said, we’ve got a great car at the core and if we keep adding performance and we can go through the corners quicker, maybe we can narrow that deficit down a little bit until we improve, or until we close the gap on power.”Lewis Hamilton will return to Ferrari’s factory in Maranello, Italy this week. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)There will be celebrations in Maranello, where Ferrari’s factory is based, and Hamilton will return there this week before the paddock heads to Austria.He’ll review the weekend and said he would speak to the aerodynamicists to learn about what is in the pipeline, “when they’re coming, what effect they’ll have, re-steer if I need to in whatever direction I feel that the car needs to go.”And that will be the key for this year’s championship.Mercedes has set the benchmark, but as the 11 teams continue to learn more about the regulations and their respective cars, performance will be unlocked and it’ll be a battle of the upgrades, teams one-upping each other on any given week.“What is important is that this season the championship will be based on the capacity of the team to develop, not on the picture of Barcelona,” Vasseur said.“Usually, probably the last 25 years, we are used to say that the good car in Barcelona will dominate the season, but I think this season would be much more based on the capacity of all the teams to bring performance to the car.”
