The trick behind Lewis Hamilton's best qualifying result for Ferrari

The seven-time world champion has taken the first front row start of his Ferrari career at this weekend's Barcelona GP

Lewis Hamilton overcame a tricky start to his Barcelona Grand Prix weekend by leaving the track before qualifying, where he took second for Sunday’s Formula 1 contest.

The Ferrari driver split the Mercedes cars and was just 0.064s behind polesitter George Russell, in what was his best qualifying result since joining the Scuderia at the beginning of 2025.

It came despite largely playing catch-up, as Hamilton gave his seat for opening practice to Ferrari junior Dino Beganovic as part of F1’s young driver rules for FP1 sessions.

This meant the seven-time world champion first hit the track for second practice, where he finished ninth and was 1.2s off the pace before reducing that deficit to 0.7s in final practice.

That was still a frustrating gap despite the relative improvement, particularly as he was half a second behind team-mate Charles Leclerc, but that all changed in qualifying.

“For the first time ever, I left the track between P3 and qualifying,” reacted Hamilton, whose team-mate crashed in Q3. “I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here’, and I went back to my motorhome.

“I was just on the engineer's call, just on my phone, but I kind of went where I had a bit of a reset. Came back and I was able to somehow get back on it. So yeah, whatever it did, it worked.”

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, George Russell, Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Hamilton was therefore naturally buoyant, being left surprised by the pace of his heavily upgraded SF-26, qualifying two tenths above championship leader Kimi Antonelli in third.

“It feels great to be up here,” the Briton added. “This weekend’s been so difficult. Normally it’s okay to miss P1, but it had a huge offset.

“So we went into P2, I was just over a second off and then we just didn’t feel quite comfortable enough. P3, again, I was easily four tenths, five tenths off and I was thinking, ‘jeez, where am I going to get that pace’.”

“I went and left the track between P3 and qualifying. Came back and Q1 I was first. So I knew I had a good balance and I was really comfortable on that first session.

“Q2 was a little bit harder with traffic and then these guys [Russell and Antonelli] did a great lap. Naturally, congrats to George, but we’re in a good position to be able to fight for tomorrow, so we have a race.”

Ferrari’s hopes of victory therefore lie with Hamilton on Sunday considering Leclerc starts in 10th and if the world champion were to win, it’d be his first since Belgium in July 2024.