After 26 long races and the worst season in the career of Formula 1’s greatest ever driver, Lewis Hamilton is finally off the mark with Ferrari.
The seven-time world champion secured his first podium for the Scuderia at long last at the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix, beating teammate Charles Leclerc to third behind the two supersonic Mercedes in a thriller. Team principal Fred Vasseur, watching from the pit wall, permitted himself something approaching a smile. The car finally listened.
Because in 2025, it didn’t. The SF-25 spoke a dialect Hamilton couldn’t fluently translate — rear-end nervousness that violated every instinct a seven-time champion had spent eighteen years hardwiring into his reflexes.
P6 became his recurring calling card, and at times during the season, such a finish represented a good result for the GOAT, a stark contrast to when he was competing for race wins and for World Championships.
Hamilton breaks his Ferrari podium duck
Then China arrived. Kimi Antonelli won, the teenage Italian sensation hand-picked by Toto Wolff to replace the outgoing Hamilton a year ago. George Russell took second. Hamilton, third, shared a podium with two men whose careers he’d either mentored or overshadowed — an unofficial reunion of the Mercedes dynasty.
Peter Bonnington’s voice crackling through the radio with something unmistakably warm. “Like sitting here with my whole family,” Hamilton said post-race. Bonno[JL1] [JB2] [JL3] wasn’t wrong.
Ferrari is now Mercedes’ biggest challenger. Not just on track, but in the betting charts too. The latest F1 online gambling odds list Hamilton as a 14/1 fringe contender, level with both Leclerc and the relentless Max Verstappen.
But if the veteran Brit is to reel in the Silver Arrows of Russell (-180) and Antonelli (+280), he will need to win races, and plenty of them. But which grand prix on the calendar is likely to yield Hamilton’s first win in scarlet red? Let’s take a look.
Montreal
Lewis Hamilton’s maiden Formula 1 victory arrived at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in 2007. A young rookie driving in McLaren silver. The world watching a prodigy announce himself by mastering the Wall of Champions, that brutal concrete barrier that has humiliated legends.
Seven wins later throughout an iconic career for three teams, Hamilton ties Michael Schumacher’s Montreal record. He will arrive in May 2026 as a 41-year-old in scarlet, chasing his eighth.
Last year’s trip to Montreal delivered P6, Leclerc finishing ahead in P5, while Russell dominated from the get-go. But the gap was manageable — genuine race-pace promise buried inside a result that flattered nobody.
The 2026 Ferrari’s improved power delivery suits Montreal’s architecture: long straights demanding precise engine mapping, heavy braking zones where Hamilton’s mastery has always managed to find a few tenths, and a tire-management challenge that his particular genius has always managed to conquer.
Front row on the grid here, with that power unit clicking? The Wall of Champions has witnessed 19 years of Hamilton history. An eighth win would write the final chapter.
Barcelona
Five consecutive wins, 2017 through 2021. Matching Senna’s Monaco streak — not just equalling records but inhabiting the same mythological territory.
Pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya also saw Hamilton go fastest, a result that surprised everyone and suggested that maybe, just maybe, the GOAT was back for one last hurrah.
The 2025 Spanish GP hurt precisely because of just how well Hamilton has historically performed here. P6 from P5 on the grid — the Ferrari simply ghosted him through Turn 9, the car’s ground-effect downforce behaving inconsistently in ways his inputs couldn’t compensate for.
But 2026’s package addresses that rear-load consistency Ferrari spent winter rebuilding. Hamilton’s Catalunya DNA — that specific understanding of how to deploy power through the final sector, how to nurse the medium compound into lap twelve without surrendering front-end load — could unlock 0.2 seconds the telemetry alone won’t reveal.
Don’t sleep on this one. The setup sorcerer has blueprints nobody else can read.
Silverstone
Nine wins. Most victories any driver has ever accumulated at a single Formula 1 venue. Full stop, end of discussion, record books closed. But statistics don’t capture what Silverstone does to Hamilton — how 120,000 British voices somehow permeate a crash helmet and rewire a driver’s biochemistry.
The 2024 British GP ended a near-three-year drought in the most emotional of victories. Then he left for Ferrari. Now Silverstone is awaiting its sequel.
The 2025 British GP gave him P4 — his best Ferrari result up until that China podium — and the fast-flowing layout exposed genuine SF-26 potential, even within a car still mid-adaptation.
The 2026 Sprint weekend format on July 3-5 compresses everything into brutal intensity; qualifying matters enormously here, and Hamilton’s high-downforce setup instincts at Silverstone are simply unrivalled.
Will the crowd carry him to victory? They always have. A 10th Silverstone win would be a fairytale, and one that’s now distinctly possible following Hamilton’s recent upturn in form.
Hungary
Eight wins. Nine poles. 362 laps led — more than any driver in Hungarian history, across three distinct regulatory eras. Budapest is Hamilton’s chessboard, and he plays it like a grandmaster.
The tight, twisty “Monaco without walls” layout, where strategy execution separates champions from also-rans, where the undercut kingship Hamilton developed at Mercedes becomes decisive surgical weaponry. You manufacture time in the pits here, not just on track.
The 2025 Hungarian anomaly — P12, rear grip evaporating in summer heat — was exactly that: an anomaly. The 2026 Ferrari’s downforce-heavy trim represents a genuine Scuderia strength in Budapest’s low-speed labyrinth, and arriving back-to-back with Silverstone means momentum compounds.
A ninth win breaks his own outright record. The tire-whisperer at the circuit where tire management is everything, in a Ferrari that now actually responds to his inputs? Don’t be surprised to see a record-breaking eighth world title challenge ignite here.
