Kimi Antonelli won the Monaco Grand Prix, but the drive that had the paddock talking belonged to the man who finished behind him. Lewis Hamilton brought his Ferrari home second on a chaotic afternoon in Monte Carlo — comfortably his strongest weekend in red, and a second podium in eight days after his run to P2 in Canada.
Hamilton was candid afterwards about how far he and the team had travelled. He described inheriting a car built around his predecessors and slowly reshaping it to suit himself over a difficult first winter at Maranello.
"I inherited a car that wasn't really suited for me, something I didn't like," Hamilton said. "We did a lot of work to develop it. I told them where I wanted to go and they listened, and they put the things I wanted on the car."
He reserved particular credit for team principal Fred Vasseur, who pushed the changes through.
"I begged Fred for certain changes," Hamilton said. "I said: I need you, so please, I'll give everything, I'll do anything for you to do these things. And he moved heaven and earth for me. I'm really grateful, and I hope he's proud of these last two race results."
Peter Windsor, analysing the race on his channel, tied Hamilton's afternoon to a technical call that may now ripple across the Ferrari garage. Hamilton, Windsor explained, had pushed the team toward a brake setup he was comfortable with — a direction his team-mate had resisted until Monaco exposed Charles Leclerc's own discomfort under braking.
"Kudos for Lewis Hamilton coming up with a brake system now that it appears Charles Leclerc will be gravitating to it," Windsor said.
On the quality of the drive itself, Windsor was unequivocal. Hamilton was "driving really well," he said, holding a clean P2 and producing an excellent launch at the late standing restart that briefly threatened Antonelli before the Mercedes edged away up the hill toward Massenet.
Not everything went Ferrari's way. Hamilton picked up a five-second penalty for exceeding the pit-lane speed limit — one of an unusually long list of drivers caught out on the day — but the team served it during a safety-car stop, leaving his result intact. Leclerc, running third behind him, crashed on cold tyres at the standing restart and scored nothing.
The split between the two Ferraris framed the day for the watching pundits. On the trackside P1 with Matt and Tommy podcast, the hosts called the sight of Leclerc going into the wall from a podium position "horrendous" and "devastating," while conceding that Hamilton's recovery to second was the team's only genuine bright spot.
The wider verdict was blunter. Reviewing the weekend, F1 commentator Formula Duck argued Hamilton was the only Ferrari driver who could be proud of his work, describing the 41-year-old's form as a return to vintage Hamilton after he stopped chasing simulator runs and leaned more on instinct.
Hamilton himself put the turnaround down to listening rather than luck. Two podiums in eight days suggest the message has finally landed. Ferrari head to Barcelona next weekend with the same brake changes now planned for Leclerc — and, for the first time this season, a clear sense of which driver is dragging the most out of the SF-26.
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*Originally published on [Newsformula One](https://newsformula.one/article/hamilton-delivers-vintage-monaco-p2-after-begging-vasseur-for-changes). Visit for full coverage.*
