Racing
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Lewis Hamilton took British Grand Prix sprint pole for Ferrari by 0.011s over Kimi Antonelli after Ferrari unexpectedly wiped out its recent straight-line weakness at Silverstone and beat Mercedes on energy deployment where it had expected to lose most.
That was the shock of Friday. Ferrari had arrived fearing a major deficit on the straights after struggling on power-sensitive tracks, but Hamilton said the team had expected to lose “up to six tenths” there and had been four tenths down in Austria. “In reality, nothing of that was visible,” he said after sprint qualifying.
Instead, Hamilton’s pole lap pointed to a clear change in Ferrari’s speed profile. The data cited from the lap showed him reaching 322km/h at Copse, about 10km/h quicker than Antonelli, and then finding another gain of up to 10km/h on the short run from Stowe towards Vale. Ferrari had looked likely to pay for that early in the lap on the Hangar Straight, but that drop never really came. Hamilton was only slower than Antonelli there, and not by much, before the Ferrari accelerated strongly again out of Stowe.
Mercedes did not appear simply to be losing everywhere. Its lap shape suggested a different energy-feed choice, with Antonelli stronger through parts of Maggots and Becketts and using more deployment earlier in the lap. In the middle phase of sprint qualifying he was much faster to Maggots but slower on the Hangar Straight, then in SQ3 Mercedes appeared to spend more earlier in the lap, including a small acceleration jump between Brooklands and Luffield.
There was also a notable quirk to the Mercedes approach. Both Antonelli and George Russell were reported to lift off the throttle just before the finish line on every lap as part of a legal tactic designed to maximize power before the line. Even so, that left Antonelli 5km/h slower than Hamilton at the line itself, underlining that Ferrari’s gain was not just a matter of Mercedes choosing a different trick.
Mercedes chief engineer Andrew Shovlin admitted the team did not yet fully understand the gap. He said there was “a speed difference that we still need to understand and that cost us a lot of time on the straights.” Russell was equally surprised by Ferrari’s pace, saying: “I think a few things don’t really make sense. If I were to have predicted, I’d have said Ferrari would be quick last weekend and we would be quick this weekend.”
Part of Mercedes’ problem was also in the car rather than only the deployment plan. Shovlin said setup changes were made during the session to give the car more stability, but that even in SQ3 the front axle still felt too aggressive. In gusty Silverstone conditions that left the Mercedes harder to drive cleanly, and that matters on a lap where efficient energy management rewards a calmer car and cleaner cornering.
That helps explain why Ferrari’s underlying strengths showed up so clearly. The car is regarded as strong in long corners and less easily disturbed, and Ferrari has a reputation for arriving with a good baseline setup on sprint weekends. Paddock thinking also pointed to Austria having hidden the true effect of Ferrari’s latest engine update, with high temperatures potentially exaggerating the weakness of a heat-sensitive package. At Silverstone, with air temperatures below 25C and a circuit only 133 meters above sea level, the combination of that power-unit step and Ferrari’s Barcelona aero development suddenly looked much more like a genuine Mercedes-level threat.