Mercedes can swap drivers mid-race without breaking a sweat. Ferrari can’t even decide whose side to take without a lap of radio silence and a driver fuming into his headset. That, according to Will Buxton, is the real story from Zandvoort, and it has nothing to do with who’s faster.
The former F1 TV pundit used his Up To Speed podcast to pick apart Ferrari’s handling of the Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc situation at the Dutch Grand Prix, and his conclusion is blunt: this was never really a test of the two drivers. It was a test of whether Ferrari’s management can actually manage.
Mercedes Acts, Ferrari Dithers
The contrast Buxton draws is not subtle. When Kimi Antonelli closed in on George Russell on fresher tyres, Mercedes made the call instantly and swapped the positions without fuss. No drama, no lingering resentment, job done. Ferrari, faced with Hamilton closing rapidly on Leclerc mid-race, did nothing of the sort. Hamilton had to ask for the road repeatedly, and the silence from the pitwall said more than any team statement could.
According to Motorsport.com, Buxton framed the whole episode as a question of execution rather than talent, and he’s right to. Nobody doubts Ferrari has two drivers capable of winning races. The doubt is whether the people running the pitwall know how to referee them when it matters.
The Golden Child and the GOAT
Buxton’s read on the internal politics is where it gets interesting. Leclerc, he argues, is Ferrari’s golden child in every sense: signed since he was a teenager, embedded in the fabric of the team, unlikely to ever wear another set of overalls. Hamilton is the seven-time champion who arrived in 2025 with a very different frame of reference, one built on a Mercedes operation that pulled the trigger the moment a strategic call needed making.
“Is this Ferrari’s first real test of the Charles and Lewis relationship? Well, if it’s not a test of their relationship, it’s a test of how the team handles it because Charles is the golden child, right? Always has been. He’s Ferrari through and through. He’s probably never going to race anywhere else. It’s his place, and he’s been there since he was a kid.” – Will Buxton
That last point matters more than it might seem. A team can get away with favouring one driver, or none at all, as long as everyone understands the hierarchy going in. Ferrari has never openly declared one, which means every hesitant radio call gets read as evidence of a hidden preference, whichever way it breaks.
You Cannot Please Both of Them
Buxton’s wider point is one team principals rarely say out loud but every one of them knows to be true: in a genuine two-driver title fight, somebody is always going home unhappy. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with the kind of muddled non-decision Ferrari produced at Zandvoort, where nobody was pleased because nobody actually decided anything.
“And then you’ve got Lewis, the GOAT, seven-time champion. You can’t please both, right? In an F1 team, one driver’s going to be p***ed, one driver’s going to come out happy. That’s just how it works out, especially in these kinds of scenarios. And you kind of have to take your medicine sometimes and realise that you’re going to p*** off one.” – Will Buxton
Hamilton, of all people, knows exactly what a functioning pitwall looks like, having spent twelve years inside one. That is precisely why his frustration lands as more than a driver moaning on the radio. He has the receipts. He has seen a title-winning operation issue the call in seconds and knows Ferrari isn’t there yet.
“Lewis has experience of a team that executes immediately at Mercedes, and he wants that world championship-winning mentality at Ferrari because unless you have that, you’re never going to win a title. So I can see the frustration in Lewis of being like, ‘Guys, we’re making ourselves look like d***s here. This is stupid.’ Because he has experience of the other side of the coin.” – Will Buxton
The Numbers Still Make This Worth Fixing
Here’s what makes Ferrari’s indecision genuinely costly rather than just embarrassing: both drivers are still in play. Hamilton sits on 183 points, only 59 behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, while Leclerc trails Lando Norris by just four points for fourth. Norris, fresh off back-to-back wins in Hungary and at Zandvoort, has all the momentum, which makes Ferrari’s inability to referee its own drivers look even more careless. A team serious about winning a title cannot afford to burn laps and goodwill because nobody upstairs wants to make an uncomfortable call.
Buxton’s closing questions are the ones Ferrari’s management should be losing sleep over. Is this a systemic Ferrari issue, or a Hamilton-Leclerc issue specifically? And how quickly does it need sorting before it curdles into something worse than a radio moan?
“Is it a Ferrari problem? Is it a Charles-Lewis problem? How quickly do they have to nip it in the bud? Do they have to just figure out what they’re doing and actually get it written down, or understand that the level of execution that they have at the moment just simply isn’t what a championship-winning team has?” – Will Buxton
A Problem That Won’t Fix Itself
Ferrari has spent years assembling a driver line-up that, on paper, should be the envy of the grid. What it has not assembled, on this evidence, is the spine to actually manage it. McLaren is already being talked up as Mercedes’ biggest threat, and Ferrari risks becoming a footnote in that fight if it keeps freezing at the exact moments Mercedes treats as routine. Two title-calibre drivers were handed to this team. Whether the pitwall deserves them is looking like an entirely separate question.
