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Mike Hezemans feels Lewis Hamilton made a crucial difference in the 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, as Ferrari no longer boast an “advantage” with their race starts.
Hamilton scored his first Grand Prix victory as a Ferrari driver in Montmelo on Sunday, as the 41-year-old utilised a late virtual safety car to run away from Mercedes racer George Russell. A margin of 19.561 seconds ultimately split the British drivers at the end of the 66-lap event.
Running in clean air after coming back out from his third and final pit stop in the lead helped Hamilton win the Barcelona-Catalunya GP with such a big lead. Mercedes have also revealed they “incorrectly” induced more oversteer to Russell’s car due to an issue at his second stop.
Lewis Hamilton is now only missing a Grand Prix pole position for Ferrari 🏆 Predict when it will come?
Ferrari’s superiority at race starts is over after George Russell denied Lewis Hamilton in Barcelona
Russell had largely covered Hamilton off during the earlier stages of the race, despite Ferrari moving early to put the latter onto a three-stop strategy forcing Mercedes to adapt his two-stopper. The 28-year-old had also held Hamilton off at the start, despite having harder tyres.
READ MORE: The best moments of Lewis Hamilton’s career in Formula 1
Ferrari and Hamilton opted to start the Barcelona-Catalunya GP on a set of the soft Pirelli C4 tyres, whereas Mercedes gave polesitter Russell a set of the medium C3 tyres. Earlier in the year, Hamilton would have been expected to fly by Russell due to Ferrari’s rapid race starts.
Fitting the SF-26 with a smaller turbo helped Ferrari to make rapid race starts, yet Hezemans believes Mercedes et al have now caught up with their rivals in red. Ferrari initially designed their engine with a smaller turbo to deal with the removal of the MGU-H in the PU formula.
Hezemans told RacingNews365: “The people who work in Formula 1 are smart people. They are not just going to let the sport go to hell. They’re definitely working on it…
“Everyone got off to a good start again. The Ferrari actually doesn’t really have an advantage anymore, because Hamilton got away really perfectly just on his reaction time.
“You could see that. Then I thought. ‘Oh, he’s going to take the lead at the start’. Not at all. Only [Red Bull’s Isack] Hadjar had a poor start, but apart from that, everyone else actually had a fine start.
“Everything is starting to come much closer together again. And, because of that, it is becoming more exciting again, too.”
Your championship standings after the Barcelona GP. How worried should Kimi Antonelli be about Lewis Hamilton?
Ferrari duo Hamilton and Charles Leclerc made the fastest starts across the early races, and it was particularly evident during the Grands Prix in Australia and China to open the season. Leclerc took the lead off the line in Melbourne, and Hamilton also took the lead in Shanghai.
But F1 has since made tweaks to the race start procedures to help the teams that have had more problems than Ferrari with their cars lacking enough power after the formation lap. A key issue had been the teams with larger turbochargers needing to spool their engines more.
The changes that F1 made to the rules, on top of teams like Mercedes introducing updates to improve their starts after Andrea Kimi Antonelli lost places off the grid during each of the early races, was not lost on Hamilton before the Monaco GP, as Ferrari’s advantage shrank.
Hamilton knows that changes to F1’s rules nullified Ferrari’s advantage at race starts, with each team now often rather even off the line. It was certainly the case in Barcelona, as the seven-time champion barely gained any ground on Russell despite him using a softer tyre.
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