Ferrari were beaten at Silverstone until they weren’t. A wheel-cover problem on Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes turned a lost afternoon into a points swing, and for a few hours the 2026 championship looked like a fight again. Then came three penalties in the run to the summer break, and Jolyon Palmer’s verdict on the Hamilton Ferrari mistakes that followed is blunt: “pretty sloppy”.
Formula 1 restarts at Zandvoort this weekend with Antonelli on 219 points and holding a 50-point cushion over Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari, per Motorsport.com’s report of Palmer’s comments on the F1 Nation podcast. Palmer’s argument is that Mercedes’ vulnerabilities this season have been rare, and that Ferrari keep being handed the opening and keep dropping it.
The Hamilton Ferrari mistakes Palmer will not let go
Palmer’s charge sheet runs to three items, all of them self-inflicted. “So you’ve got a jump start for Lewis at Silverstone just because he moved his hand too quickly. That’s pretty sloppy,” he told host Tom Clarkson. “You’ve got him unlatching the pitlane speed limiter a fraction early in Hungary. It’s hard to argue that’s not pretty sloppy. You’ve got the biggest one of all of them probably being the impeding penalty in Hungary. My word, that’s so sloppy from the race engineer at that point and maybe a little bit from Lewis as well.”
ReadMotorSport set out how the penalties piled up across those three races at the time. Palmer’s addition is the cost. “Those three penalties may have cost them some points, obviously, but also a little bit of momentum and a little bit of that pressure on Kimi. So, they have to cut those out.”
His disappointment is sharpened by what Antonelli’s car was doing in the same stretch. “I’m a little bit disappointed in them in recent races because I think they’ve been given this chance with some reliability woes for Kimi,” Palmer said. “The wheel cover stuff at Silverstone was a really lucky strike for Ferrari. They were going to lose that race, and they ended up coming through, taking a big dent out of Kimi’s lead. And then they go and get all these penalties.”
The frustrating part: Hamilton is driving well
None of this is a critique of Hamilton’s pace. Palmer was explicit that the seven-time champion is “driving brilliantly” in his second season at Maranello, and pointed to him matching or beating team-mate Charles Leclerc as the evidence; his suspicion is a lapse in concentration rather than any loss of speed. That is the uncomfortable version of the story for Ferrari, because the driving is not the problem being described here — and Antonelli already has six wins from the first half of the season.
Mercedes are about to hand Ferrari another opening
And another chance is coming. Mercedes expect to take power unit grid penalties over the final 12 rounds, with Toto Wolff floating Antonelli’s home race in Italy as the place to absorb one — partly, he suggested, because starting further back might take some expectation off a 19-year-old leading a world championship. Wolff also said he would talk it over with the driver’s father, Marco, which prompted a raised eyebrow from James Hinchcliffe: “Why on earth is the driver’s father having an input on power unit penalties?” The former IndyCar driver called it “a very telling comment”.
It fits the pattern we saw at Budapest, where Mercedes refused to pick a side between Antonelli and George Russell, who sits third, nine points behind Hamilton. A team managing a teenage title leader and an in-form second driver, and planning deliberate grid drops, is a team with soft weekends ahead of it.
Which brings it back to Silverstone. Ferrari’s best afternoon of the summer arrived by accident, and they spent the goodwill on avoidable stewards’ visits. Twelve races remain, Mercedes are going to give them at least one more gift, and Zandvoort — the last Dutch Grand Prix on the calendar — is where Hamilton finds out whether the second half of 2026 is a title bid or a tidy-up job.
