Lewis Hamilton picked up two more penalties in Hungary, taking his total to four across the last three race weekends.
The first came in qualifying. A three-place grid penalty for impeding Oscar Piastri in Q3 dropped him from a provisional front-row start to fifth. Hamilton said he’d been told too late that Piastri was closing in behind him. Ferrari have since accepted the miscommunication was partly theirs.
The second came mid-race. Ferrari pitted Hamilton under the virtual safety car, and he was clocked at 80.1km/h in an 80km/h pit lane. Five seconds, for a margin of 0.1km/h. It dropped him from what would have been fourth on the track to fifth, behind team-mate Charles Leclerc.
Both sit on top of two more from the previous two rounds: a false start at Silverstone, a first-lap collision with George Russell at Spa.
Hamilton posted before Sunday’s race even started, saying he was doing his best to stay positive but finding it hard after three penalties in three weekends. By Sunday evening, after the fourth, he was even more blunt on the radio, telling his Ferrari engineer, Carlo Santi, that the stewards found something every time he gave them the chance.
Not all of it is on him
The pattern is worth noting because the blame isn’t always Lewis’s. The Piastri penalty followed a Ferrari communication error, not a driving mistake. The pit lane infringement followed a Ferrari decision to pit him under the VSC in the first place — a call Hamilton questioned afterwards, saying the stop wasn’t necessary and opened the door to what followed.
Silverstone and Spa both look more on him, and he’s admitted as much himself, calling it “lots of mistakes” in recent races, even while pointing to Ferrari’s part in Sunday’s two.
Where it leaves the title fight
Hamilton now heads into the summer break 50 points behind Kimi Antonelli, who finished third in Hungary and extended his lead while faster cars fell away around him.
Four penalties in three races is the kind of run that turns a potential title challenge into a fight to be the best of the rest if it isn’t fixed — and with Ferrari’s errors mixed in alongside his own, this isn’t simply a case of Lewis needing to tidy up his side of it.
