Ferrari Had Its Home Grand Prix, and Still Fell Apart. What Is Going Wrong?

Ferrari arrived at Monza with a package of upgrades and genuine confidence. The race ended with Charles Leclerc in the wall after less than five minutes and Lewis Hamilton limping home sixth, more than 20 seconds behind the winner, after his own teammate forced him into the gravel.

The tifosi, packed into the grandstands in their thousands, were visibly in tears by the end.

Why the damage started before the first corner was even finished

Hamilton was ahead of Leclerc heading into Turn 1. Leclerc ran wide through the following chicane and pushed his own teammate off the circuit, dropping Hamilton from fourth to eighth in an instant. That's not a mistake caused by a rival team. It's Ferrari losing positions to itself, in front of its own home crowd, before either car had completed a full lap.

Leclerc's own race ended minutes later anyway, crashing hard at the Parabolica while fighting Oscar Piastri, a result he described afterward as disappointing but not surprising given how the car had felt all weekend.

Why the car itself compounded the problem

Team principal Fred Vasseur had already flagged Ferrari's straight-line speed as a genuine concern heading into Monza, the most power-sensitive circuit on the calendar under the sport's new 2026 regulations. That weakness turned Hamilton's recovery drive into a much harder task than it should have been, since even a clean run through the field couldn't fully overcome a car that simply couldn't match rivals on the straights.

Hamilton also questioned Ferrari's tyre strategy afterward, frustrated the team left him on a fading medium compound through a Virtual Safety Car period several rivals used to pit.

Why the Hamilton-Leclerc tension matters beyond one race

Hamilton didn't hide his frustration with his own teammate afterward, calling the Turn 1 incident "damaging" for the team. Leclerc pushed back just as directly, questioning why anyone was framing the two of them as being against each other. That kind of public disagreement between teammates, right after a race that damaged both their results simultaneously, is a genuine warning sign for a team that needs internal alignment to compete at the front.

A team fighting itself for position, even briefly, is giving away points no rival had to fight for.

What a collapse like this actually signals

One bad weekend doesn't undo a season, but a home race unraveling this specifically, teammate conflict, a known car weakness, and a strategic misstep all compounding in the same afternoon, suggests problems that go beyond bad luck. Vasseur openly admitted the team knew Monza would be difficult before the race even started, which raises a harder question about whether Ferrari's car simply isn't built for every kind of circuit it needs to compete on.

Ferrari's home race turned into one of its most damaging weekends of the season, on every level at once. Is this simply one difficult circuit exposing a specific weakness, or is it evidence of deeper structural problems, both in the car and between its two drivers, that Ferrari has yet to actually fix?