10/06/2026
under bus
⚙️THIS PIECE is for Ferrari fans and true blue F1 fans. Watching Lewis Hamilton go from being trounced by Charles Leclerc in the SF-25 last year, to being 2nd in the championship standings —behind a youthful and brilliant Kimi Antonelli — has a very investing technical backstory to it:
HE CHANGED THE CAR. NOW HE’S CHANGING THE TEAM.
Lewis Hamilton didn’t just bring himself to Ferrari. He brought an argument. And Monaco just proved he won it.
THE PROBLEM WAS NEVER THE DRIVER
When Hamilton arrived at Maranello ahead of the 2025 season, the conventional wisdom was straightforward. Brilliant driver. New environment. Give him time to adjust.
Ferrari gave him Brembo.
Hamilton had spent twelve years using Carbone Industrie’s braking systems at Mercedes. Ferrari’s arrangement with Brembo stretched back over half a century — discs, pads, the whole system. The calipers were already Brembo across the paddock. That part was never in dispute. But the discs and pads are where feel lives. And feel, for Hamilton, is everything.
Over those twelve years at Mercedes, Hamilton developed a style where he stood on the brakes into corner entry and liked a strong initial bite, progressively letting go as the car rolled into the corner.  That style wasn’t an accident. It was a system. Built on, calibrated around, and inseparable from Carbone Industrie’s specific grip signature.
Why? You may ask. Carbone Industrie’s pad/disc combination has a very strong initial bite when hot — perfect for that initial phase where Hamilton stamped on the pedal. Brembo’s curve is broader. More progressive. More forgiving across a wider thermal window. Most drivers love it. Hamilton didn’t. He needed the spike. Without it, he had no reference point into the corner.
He wasn’t wrong. He just needed Ferrari to believe him.
FERRARI SAID NO. THEN SAID MAYBE. THEN SAID YES.
Before 2025 even started, word leaked that Hamilton was pushing to run Carbone Industrie discs and pads. Ferrari held the line. So did Brembo.
A Carbone Industrie source told a Japanese outlet: “Everyone knows that Lewis wants to have Carbone Industrie brake discs on his car.” Brembo responded publicly, confirming that “all the components of the braking system, including the carbon discs, will remain supplied by Brembo in 2025 and beyond.”
That statement was issued in December 2024.
It didn’t hold.
What the screenshots from now confirm is the full internal timeline. Hamilton had long insisted on changing suppliers — not for quality reasons, but for the feel he had developed over the years with the French discs. Ferrari remained loyal to its long-standing partnership of over 50 years with Brembo and to solutions with which it had always gotten along quite well.
Then Hamilton kept pushing.
During the 2025 Canadian Grand Prix, Ferrari introduced a Brembo pad update that calmed the situation somewhat. Hamilton felt a bit more comfortable. But it wasn’t the answer. Through the winter, he continued pushing for a solution that truly suited him. After a pre-season test in Bahrain, he finally convinced the team. Carbone Industrie discs and pads on car 44. Unofficially committed, starting from the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka. The rest of the braking system — calipers and everything else on car 44 — remains Brembo. A surgical hybrid. Precisely the setup Ferrari said would never happen.
Lewis Hamilton got it anyway.
MEANWHILE, LECLERC WAS CRACKING
Here’s what reframes the entire narrative for us F1 geeks.
This was never purely a Hamilton adaptation problem. Leclerc — who grew up on Brembo, who has never driven anything else professionally — started losing his feel too.
Ahead of Monaco, Leclerc admitted he was “struggling” with the brakes. “With the brakes I’m not super confident at the moment. That’s why I’ve been making a few more mistakes over the past two weekends, at least under braking with the lock-ups, and it’s just been a lot trickier.”
In qualifying, he said flatly: “I don’t really know where to brake around the Circuit de Monaco.” He’d been plagued by issues all weekend, calling the feeling under braking “horrendous” in FP3.
This wasn’t Hamilton’s problem being exported across the garage. This was a Ferrari-wide braking crisis exposing itself in the most unforgiving circuit on the calendar.
The race made it catastrophic.
MONACO. LAP 67. THREE OUT OF FOUR BRAKES.
Leclerc had held the final podium place for the majority of the race, gaining a position when Verstappen struggled off the grid and retired. Then, following a late Safety Car, he hit trouble at the restart — going straight on at Antony Noghès, sliding helplessly into the barriers.
Over team radio he didn’t mince words. “Honestly, I’m not even going to take the **** blame! These **** brakes!”
In front of the cameras he was controlled. But the data was damning.
“Out of the four brakes, I had three not working. The front left was working well, the front right was half working, and the two rear brakes were not working at all. And when I say at all, it’s that on data, there’s no deceleration at all. It’s like the calipers were not even in the car.”
“I’ve always been very honest, and no matter how many mistakes I do, I would hate to look at myself in the mirror and see myself finding excuses when I do a mistake. That’s why I’m always bluntly honest whenever I’m in front of cameras, but I’m not going to take any of it today.”
Three corners before Leclerc crashed, Hamilton had gone through the same corner. Cleanly. On Carbone Industrie brakes.
THEN LECLERC SAID IT.
“We DO HAVE the solution and I will go into Lewis’ direction from next race onwards, and that will solve the issues I deal with.”
He was precise but careful with the technical language. “The only thing I can say is that WE HAVE A SOLUTION. I’ll go to Lewis’ configuration from next race onwards, which hopefully will be a step. But yeah, it’s been a nightmare.”
Lewis’ configuration. Those two words are the whole story.
According to , what Leclerc was referring to is precisely the Carbon Industries disc/pads solution Hamilton has been running since Suzuka — a disc that Leclerc may test himself in the coming weeks, specifically to regain a feel that, in their words, seems to have been lost.
Charles Leclerc. Born in Monaco. Raised on Brembo. Chasing a feel he no longer has.
And the man who brought that solution to the garage has been using it for races.
Charles Leclerc recently openly praised Lewis Hamilton's positive impact on Ferrari, noting that Hamilton's deep experience has helped smooth out the operation and elevate how the 1,500-person team functions day-to-day.
BREMBO’S RESPONSE TELLS YOU WHERE THIS ENDS
Brembo did not stay quiet after Monaco.
The company released an official statement: “Brembo Group expresses great surprise regarding what happened to Charles Leclerc during the Monaco Grand Prix and is very surprised by the statements made by the driver after the race. The partnership between Brembo and Scuderia Ferrari has continued for more than 50 years.”
Fifty years of history deployed as a defense. A company watching its flagship relationship fracture in real time, reaching for the only argument it has left.
History doesn’t stop a car at Antony Noghès Brembo.
WHAT THIS IS REALLY ABOUT
Lewis Hamilton did not arrive at Ferrari to become a Ferrari driver in the traditional sense. He arrived to build something on his terms. And one of those terms — non-negotiable, persistent, eventually vindicated — was the brakes.
He pushed during 2025. Ferrari resisted. He kept pushing through the winter. After Bahrain testing, they relented. Carbon Industries discs and pads on car 44. Quietly. Without fanfare. Starting Suzuka.
Now Leclerc — the face of Ferrari, the Monegasque heir, a driver who has never questioned Brembo in his life — is going to the same place. Not because Hamilton demanded it. Because his own brakes failed him in his own home race. And the answer was sitting in the other side of the garage the whole time.
Hamilton didn’t demand Ferrari change for him. He just kept showing up. Lap after lap, race after race, with data that made the argument for him.
These are the technical documents that he referred to throughout 2025. Many Hamilton detractors razzed Hamilton about his technical briefs. Telling him to stop focus on compiling data of the engineers already have, and just race the damn car.
Keep in mind, but for 2026 Lewis Hamilton also redesigned the steering wheel for the SF-26. The six rotary k***s on the face of the wheel reduced to just three. By consolidating and simplifying inputs. Making the wheel lighter. Giving it a slightly modified top curvature. In the very same way that he was responsible for steering wheel changes at Mercedes when he got there.

Brembo’s F1 Customer Manager Andrea Algeri had already acknowledged it plainly mid-season: “We had some complaints from him within our regular communication. We are working hard to try to put him in a comfort zone in terms of braking.”
They worked hard. It wasn’t enough. So Ferrari went somewhere else.
Lewis Hamilton has been at Ferrari for one full season plus a handful of races. In that time he has reshaped how both cars stop. And this year he is matching and now beating Charles Leclerc in just five races. In a car that has his DNA.
That’s not adaptation. That’s influence.
Ferrari — the most proudly Italian, most historically entrenched institution in this sport, with a brake partner it has trusted for fifty years — just followed an Englishman’s lead.
The quiet ones tend to always win.
- Fabian Blache III, FOFA Founder & Editor
