Antonelli Fastest in Madrid as Hamilton Ignores Four Orders to Stop His Ferrari

Kimi Antonelli topped final practice for the Spanish Grand Prix, but nobody will remember that by the time qualifying starts. What they will remember is Lewis Hamilton dragging a broken Ferrari around Madring with a puncture and a front wing wedged under the car, ignoring his own team’s instructions to stop not once, not twice, but four times.

Free Practice 3 at Madrid’s new street circuit delivered exactly the kind of chaos this place has specialised in all weekend: two red flags, a crumpled Haas, a broken Williams, and a session that ended with barely a minute of green-flag running left on the clock. Through it all, Antonelli was the only man who looked entirely unbothered, setting the pace with a 1:32.797 that nobody came close to matching.

Antonelli Sets the Pace While Everyone Else Crashes Into Things

The session started slowly, almost sleepily, given what was coming. Gabriel Bortoleto was first out in the Audi, more than five minutes into the hour, with Nico Hulkenberg following soon after. Both logged mid-1:35s on mediums, well off the ultimate pace from Friday. Interestingly, Audi had run a set of hard tyres for both drivers the day before, a compound nobody else had bothered touching, a strategic hedge that might yet matter once the race actually starts.

Alexander Albon was the first to find trouble, clipping the inside wall at Turn 21 and returning to the Williams garage with what turned out to be terminal damage: a broken rear axle and suspension ended his session there and then. His team-mate Carlos Sainz nearly joined him in the wall list moments later, locking up hard into Turn 7 and somehow stopping just short of head-on contact.

Once the softs came out, the times tumbled fast. Antonelli’s first flying lap on the red-walled tyre, a 1:33.664, put him over four tenths clear of Lando Norris, who had spent Friday fighting his own gearbox gremlins after McLaren made his FP3 running an absolute priority following the failure. Charles Leclerc responded almost immediately, going three tenths quicker than the Mercedes on his very next lap.

Hamilton’s Coming Apart at the Final Corner

Then Lance Stroll needed the escape road at Turn 20, a minor moment that barely registered next to what followed. Lewis Hamilton locked up at the final corner and put his Ferrari straight into the barrier, a crash violent enough to break the front wing and trigger the session’s first red flag. What happened next is the part Ferrari will want to forget.

Hamilton reversed the car out of the barrier and kept going, front wing scraping along beneath the chassis, front-right tyre already shredding into a puncture. His race engineer Carlo Santi told him to stop. Hamilton kept driving. Santi told him again. Hamilton kept driving. It took, by PlanetF1’s count, four separate instructions before Hamilton finally parked the car, and even then only after being told it was now a formal request from the FIA race director rather than a suggestion from his own pit wall.

“Stop in the safest place possible.” – Carlo Santi
“If I can make it back I will. If not, I will do it safely.” – Lewis Hamilton
“We have a puncture on the front right.” – Carlo Santi
“I can see that.” – Lewis Hamilton

It is difficult to overstate how badly this reads for a seven-time world champion who spends most weekends lecturing everyone else about racecraft. F1’s 2026 sporting regulations are explicit that driving, or failing to stop, a car with significant or obvious damage can draw a reprimand or a grid penalty. Race control had not confirmed an investigation as of the session’s end, but Hamilton has form here that stewards rarely ignore twice.

Sky Sports F1 pundit Anthony Davidson did not hold back when discussing the incident on the broadcast, framing it as precisely the kind of behaviour a driver in Hamilton’s position should know better than to repeat.

“Any young driver that is watching this right now, you don’t do that. You just don’t do that. If it went under the car completely and jacked your front wheels up and there were marshals on the track, you’ve got to think of all these scenarios.” – Anthony Davidson

Whatever the stewards decide, Hamilton has already paid one price: he lost the rest of FP3 and, with it, any meaningful qualifying simulation on a circuit where nobody has useful reference data to fall back on.

Bearman Adds to the Wreckage Count

The second red flag arrived with barely a minute left, when Oliver Bearman speared into the wall hard at Turn 11. He walked away unhurt, which is more than can be said for his Haas, reduced to a crumpled mess heading into qualifying. Between Albon’s broken suspension, Hamilton’s shredded front wing and Bearman’s write-off, Madring’s inaugural weekend has now claimed some serious hardware, on top of Arvid Lindblad’s earlier FP2 shunt that forced Racing Bulls into an overnight chassis change without breaking curfew, as noted by an earlier RacingNews.Today report.

Amid all that carnage, Antonelli simply got on with the job. He slotted into the gap between Leclerc and Piastri before pushing to a 1:32.797 in the session’s frantic closing stages, eventually topping the times from Leclerc and Piastri, the top three separated by less than two tenths. It is the kind of quietly dominant weekend that has become Antonelli’s trademark this season, and with a Mercedes championship lead that already looks close to unassailable, another tidy practice topper barely raises an eyebrow anymore.

Qualifying Arrives With Nobody Sure What to Expect

None of the three practice sessions at Madring has told anyone anything definitive about race pace, degradation or overtaking, and FP3’s stop-start nature did little to change that. Qualifying gets underway at 14:00 UTC on Saturday, check the calendar for your local time, and it arrives with a grid full of drivers who have barely had a clean lap to bank all weekend.

Hamilton’s afternoon is a reminder that even champions run out of patience with their own instincts at the wrong moment. Ferrari will hope the stewards see it as a lapse rather than a pattern, but on a circuit already chewing through front wings and suspension components at an alarming rate, patience from race control might be the one thing in shorter supply than clean tarmac.

FP3 Classification, Spanish Grand Prix