Brazil Grand Prix: Hamilton, Leclerc, and Verstappen Face Challenges
Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen will all start on the back foot in Brazil, after a bruising Friday at Interlagos forced their teams into costly engine changes.
What was shaping up as a straight fight at the front has turned into a high‑stakes recovery mission.
Ferrari roll the dice
Ferrari came out of practice looking rattled. Grip was elusive, balance was off, and the SF-26 never looked settled on the bumpy, low-grip surface of the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace.
So the team pulled the trigger.
Both Hamilton and Leclerc take fresh internal combustion engines, a move that was planned but not necessarily for this weekend. The price: 10-place grid penalties each for Sunday’s grand prix.
It’s a bold call, but Friday left them little room to hide. Leclerc labelled it one of the team’s toughest Fridays of the season, and team principal Frederic Vasseur didn’t sugar-coat it either. The tarmac, he pointed out, is behaving completely differently to the previous weekend, flipping Ferrari’s balance window on its head and leaving both drivers unhappy with the car.
Leclerc’s day was already compromised after missing FP1, and a string of issues through Friday only deepened the sense of a team scrambling to catch up. Vasseur spoke of “a lot of work” still to do and a need to be ready for anything, with an unsettled weather forecast hanging over both qualifying and the race.
Ferrari are on the back foot. But Brazil has a way of rewarding the brave.
Red Bull break curfew, and Verstappen drops to the back
If Ferrari’s decision felt like damage limitation, Red Bull’s was more of a jolt.
Max Verstappen will start from the very back after the team opted for a complete power unit change, confirmed after the team broke curfew on Friday night to work on the car.
The signs were there in practice. Verstappen reported several “small issues” and climbed out of his RB22 before the end of FP2, missing the final six minutes of running. Officially, Red Bull put it down to “inconsistencies”, but the explanation never quite matched the pictures: mechanics immediately diving under the car, Verstappen foregoing a practice start on Interlagos’ uphill grid, a detail that raised eyebrows given Red Bull’s occasionally shaky launches this season.
Coming into the weekend, the team from Milton Keynes had been keen to delay any power unit change. They insisted it wasn’t yet necessary at Interlagos. By Friday night, that stance had evaporated.
The penalty drops Verstappen into familiar territory: a long way back, with a lot of cars to pass. History suggests he’ll relish it.
A circuit built for comeback drives
If you’re going to start at the wrong end of the grid, Brazil is not the worst place to do it.
Verstappen has turned Interlagos into a personal highlight reel. Last season he charged from the pitlane to the podium. In 2024 he won from 17th on the grid, a ruthless drive that effectively killed off Lando Norris’s title hopes. Go back to 2016 and you find that wild, rain‑lashed afternoon when he scythed through the field in the closing stages after an earlier tyre misstep from Red Bull.
Hamilton’s catalogue here is just as rich. In 2021 he produced one of the defining weekends of his career: from 20th to fifth in the sprint, then from 10th to victory in the grand prix, overtaking at will around a track that rewards courage and commitment.
This weekend, though, Hamilton returns in red, and Ferrari are nowhere near as comfortable as Mercedes were that year. The SF-26 is sliding where it should be biting, and the team’s own boss admits the balance simply isn’t there yet.
Still, give Hamilton a wet track, a hostile grid position and a point to prove, and Brazil tends to respond.
Perez joins the penalty list
Sergio Perez will also be starting from the back after taking a new internal combustion engine, turbocharger and MGU-K. Red Bull, then, have both cars facing an uphill climb on Sunday, their usual control at the front traded for a double charge from deep in the pack.
For the neutral, it’s a gift: Verstappen and Perez carving through traffic, Hamilton and Leclerc trying to salvage a difficult weekend, all on a circuit that compresses the field and punishes hesitation.
Weather, chaos and opportunity
There is one more twist looming over all of this: the sky.
Forecasts still point towards a possible wet race. At Interlagos, “so-so” weather rarely means anything calm. It means showers that sweep in over the hills, dry lines that vanish in a lap, strategy sheets torn up on the pit wall.
For Hamilton, Leclerc, Verstappen and Perez, that could be the lifeline. Rain scrambles the order, amplifies talent and nerve, and turns grid penalties into little more than numbers on a page.
They’ll start scattered across the back half of the grid. They may not stay there for long.
