Penalised Lewis Hamilton explains costly Singapore brake failure

Lewis Hamilton has explained his costly late brake failure that ruined his Singapore Grand Prix.

Seven-time world champion Hamilton had been chasing down Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes for fifth place in the closing stages of Sunday’s race when he encountered braking woes.

Hamilton had to nurse his ailing Ferrari home and lost a position to teammate Charles Leclerc. 

The 40-year-old Briton was also left vulnerable to Fernando Alonso though he managed to fend off the Aston Martin driver to take seventh on the road.

But Hamilton was hit with a five-second time penalty post-race which demoted him to eighth behind Alonso for repeatedly exceeding track limits.

“It was an okay race, I didn’t get a great start. It was very difficult to overtake and I was kind of stuck in position,” Hamilton explained.

“At the end I was catching Kimi and then brakes gave up. You saw the spark come out of the left front and then I just had to back off to cool them down.

“When I cooled them down they came back a little bit, but still not back at the end.”

Alonso fumed at Hamilton in a foul-mouthed radio rant after the chequered flag but Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur downplayed safety concerns surrounding the state of his driver’s car.

“In terms of safety, yes, because we adapted the pace,” Vasseur said. “It’s not that Lewis was pushing like hell in the last lap, but he was 30 seconds slower.

“In terms of safety, it was on the safe side, but not the target. The target is to be safe, but the target is not to be safe.”

Hamilton: Ferrari not extracting full potential of car

Hamilton said he felt the “pain” for his entire team as Ferrari endured another underwhelming result with P6 and P8 in Singapore.

“Firstly, the guys are pushing so hard each weekend,” Hamilton said.

“I feel pain for all the team, from catering to marketing to the engineers, who show up every weekend and they really do give absolutely everything.

“But the car we have is just not unfortunately at the level of the guys up ahead, particularly as they’ve had some upgrades and we can’t match them. We’re on the knife edge trying to get as close as we can.”

Hamilton admitted Ferrari are not currently extracting the full potential of their SF-25 challenger.

“In qualifying I think we’re still not extracting the full potential of the car. We didn’t in the last race and we didn’t at this race,” he added.

“I think there was potential for us to have been third or fourth on the grid this weekend, if we had perfected and extracted the tyre performance, and not queued at the end of the pit lane for example.

“Then the race, we were on par pace-wise at least with a couple of the guys ahead of us but obviously not quicker, quicker.

“I think if we can get our qualifying fixed, which is very, very hard to do against these very quick cars, then maybe we can get slightly better results.  But ultimately we are still fighting for fourth, fifth, sixth at best.”