A week ago I wrote about Kimi Antonelli becoming the youngest Monaco Grand Prix winner in F1 history while Lewis Hamilton, finishing second, told him: “You’re catching me up.” Seven days later, in Barcelona, Hamilton drove the Ferrari that had been the worst car of his career for sixteen months to victory in the Spanish Grand Prix, ended a 686-day victory drought, and cut Antonelli’s championship lead from 68 points to 41. Antonelli, who had been on course for second, retired with three laps to go when his Mercedes power unit failed. Hamilton crossed the line nearly twenty seconds clear, set the fastest lap, and became the seventh-oldest race winner in Formula 1 history at 41.
The transfer of generational leadership in F1, you may notice, just got rather more interesting.
Let’s establish the numbers, because the numbers are doing a lot of work this week. Six hundred and eighty-six days is how long it had been since Hamilton last won a Grand Prix — the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix, his final season at Mercedes, July 2024. He has 105 career wins, more than any driver in F1 history. He had spent the last sixteen months giving Ferrari interviews about how he was “learning,” “adapting,” and “trusting the process,” while finishing seventh, ninth, fifth, and on one notable occasion in 2025 retiring from his home Grand Prix without scoring. On Sunday he ran a three-stop strategy in fifty-degree track temperatures, capitalised on a Virtual Safety Car for Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin breakdown on lap 41, and rebuilt a sufficient lead that George Russell, in second, never threatened him. He has now finished on the podium in five consecutive Grands Prix. He has, by any reasonable assessment, found something.
More importantly, the championship has restarted.
Going into Spain, the standings looked like this: Antonelli, 153 points; Hamilton, 85; Russell, 78. After Antonelli’s lap-63 DNF, they look like this: Antonelli, 153; Hamilton, 112; Russell, 96. Antonelli’s lead is now 41 points with thirteen Grands Prix and a Sprint or two remaining. That is, in modern F1 terms, a single bad weekend. In 2026 terms, with the new regulations producing genuinely unpredictable reliability outcomes — Verstappen DNF on lap one at Monaco, multiple electronic failures across the grid in Spain, and the FIA still tweaking the rules between rounds — 41 points is the difference between leading the championship and being passed by lunch in Austria.
The race itself was the most strategically interesting of the season. Russell led from pole, Hamilton was on softs, Antonelli was in third and looking quick. Ferrari pitted Hamilton on lap 12 — unusually early — onto hards, which forced Mercedes to follow on Russell to protect track position. Hamilton then went to mediums on lap 28. Then, on lap 41, Alonso’s car broke down at Turn 9 and triggered a Virtual Safety Car that Hamilton was already in the right window to exploit. The free pit stop dropped him back out on fresh tyres, in the lead, with the entire Mercedes pit wall presumably watching the strategy software tell them they had been outmanoeuvred. Ferrari engineered the win. Mercedes did not lose it. There is a meaningful difference.
The other detail worth lingering on is the podium itself. Hamilton, Russell, Norris. The first all-British F1 podium since 1968, when Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark stood together at Spain’s predecessor race. That is fifty-eight years. The British motorsport press will get a full week of work out of this fact alone, and they will be entirely entitled to.
Meanwhile, eight hundred and forty kilometres north at the Circuit de la Sarthe, the 94th 24 Hours of Le Mans was being won by Toyota — a story that, on any other Sunday this year, would have been the dominant motorsport headline. <a href=”https://www.carsncode.com/le-mans-2026-hypercar-field-preview/“>As I previewed two weeks ago</a>, eight hypercar manufacturers turned up. Aston Martin set the test day pace and then evaporated in 28C heat. Cadillac led for hours. BMW led for hours. Ferrari’s three-time winning streak was ended in a slightly humiliating manner — the team finished fifth and seventh and publicly complained afterwards that the Balance of Performance system had been “unbalanced from Day 1.” The Toyota #7 of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries won by 11 seconds from the #20 BMW. 350,105 spectators watched. Toyota’s first overall Le Mans win since 2022. The Ferrari sour grapes will continue for some weeks.
Which brings us back to the bigger picture. Hamilton’s Ferrari win is what Maranello signed him for. The first all-Ferrari celebration he has been part of since arriving at the team. The Italian press is in raptures. So, presumably, is John Elkann. But the real significance is what it does to the 2026 title fight. <a href=”https://www.carsncode.com/antonelli-youngest-monaco-winner-hamilton-2026/“>Antonelli’s Monaco win</a> looked like the moment the championship was effectively decided. Spain looked, by lap 50, like Antonelli was going to extend his lead. Lap 63 changed that. Hamilton now has six Grands Prix on the trot of podium finishes, the most experienced driver on the grid, and a Ferrari that for the first time this year was demonstrably the fastest car in the field over a race distance.
For Antonelli, this is the first piece of properly bad luck of his title campaign. He admitted afterwards he felt “a bit empty,” which is a remarkable summary from someone whose race ended with the engine quite literally dying with three laps remaining while he was in second place. <a href=”https://www.carsncode.com/verstappen-nurburgring-24-hours-result/“>Verstappen, meanwhile, finished fifth</a> and continues to look like a man whose extracurricular activities are providing more satisfaction than his day job.
Next up: the Canadian Grand Prix on June 28. Hamilton has won Canada seven times. Antonelli has never raced there in F1. The 2026 championship, which a week ago felt as good as decided, is now properly alive. Whether Hamilton can do this again, or whether Spain was a one-weekend confluence of strategy, weather and a free VSC, is genuinely uncertain. What is no longer uncertain is whether the seven-time world champion at Ferrari has anything left. Six hundred and eighty-six days off, and the answer turns out to be: yes, quite a lot.
At some point this season, somebody is going to have to ask Lewis Hamilton whether he was just being polite at Monaco.
