Hamilton baffled as Ferrari's Monaco qualifying pace evaporates after dominant practice

Lewis Hamilton qualified third for the Monaco Grand Prix on Saturday after Ferrari’s promising Friday pace failed to carry over, leaving the seven-time world champion struggling with a car he described as unrecognisable from the one he had driven in practice.

Ferrari topped both FP1 and FP2 at Circuit de Monaco and chose to make only minimal overnight adjustments, confident the SF-26’s balance was in good shape. But Hamilton arrived at qualifying with a car that had lost its rear-end stability, forcing the team to reduce front wing flap angle through the session to compensate. By the time Q3 arrived, the car had become more manageable — yet the damage was already done.

“I don’t think we went the wrong way with set-up, that’s the thing,” Hamilton said. “I think it was the tiniest tweaks, like a millimetre here, a millimetre there. But we really need to look into what switched because the car was completely different to what it was before and I didn’t have any rear end for some reason.”

While Ferrari was searching for answers, Mercedes and Red Bull had found pace overnight. Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen locked out the front row with their final laps of Q3, a result that caught Hamilton off guard.

“I do think with the pace that we had yesterday we could have been closer, but these guys really started putting out some amazing times at the end,” Hamilton said. “Fair play to them. We’ll push hard tomorrow — hopefully we can keep up and who knows, maybe we could have a really good start.”

Hamilton also noted that Ferrari arrived in Monaco without aerodynamic additions he had spotted on rival cars. “When we arrived on Thursday we saw other people with those trick additions to their wing — we didn’t have that, which was a little bit of a surprise,” he said.

The Briton acknowledged that the car only returned to a workable state once the team had removed around ten holes of front wing angle, but stressed that the recovery came too late to build a rhythm through the lower qualifying segments.

“It’s all about confidence. I didn’t have it — it was completely gone in Q1 — and then I was trying to pull back what I could,” he said.

Despite the frustration, Hamilton was broadly satisfied with third place given the circumstances, and will look to convert grid position into points when the Monaco Grand Prix gets underway on Sunday.