Hamilton and Verstappen Avoid Sanction After Monza Incident
The Monza crowd had barely settled into final practice when Formula 1’s fiercest modern rivalry flared again – this time not in a braking zone, but down the pit straight.
Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were cleared by the stewards of any wrongdoing after a feisty FP3 incident at the Italian Grand Prix, a near-qualifying-style duel that briefly turned the build-up into a head-to-head sprint.
Wheel-to-wheel at 300km/h in “practice”
As the field formed up for their final flying laps, Hamilton appeared to jump ahead of Verstappen in the queue exiting the pit lane, the two champions then running side by side as they thundered towards Turn 1.
Verstappen, tucked to the inside, acknowledged Hamilton with a thumbs up at full speed – a gesture that looked half playful, half pointed – before sending his Red Bull on the brakes, late and deep, down the inside into the first chicane.
Hamilton had nowhere to go. The Ferrari driver bailed out across the run-off, cutting the chicane to avoid contact. Both laps were ruined. Both drivers backed off.
On the radios, the tone was far less polite.
“He caused that,” Verstappen snapped to Red Bull.
“I got blocked by Max, so…” Hamilton reported to Ferrari.
His race engineer, Carlo Santi, came straight back: “Yes, we saw.”
The stewards reviewed the footage and the data. No penalties, no reprimands, no further action. The latest chapter in their rivalry goes into the file marked “incident noted, no case to answer”.
Frustration boils over on Verstappen’s radio
The flashpoint came shortly after Verstappen had already vented his irritation at red cars in his way.
With Sergio Perez’s Cadillac having run wide at Lesmo 1 and kicked up a shower of gravel, Verstappen and the following Ferrari were met with a cloud of stones and dust on the racing line.
“This **** Ferrari again! My God! Always in the way!” came the furious radio message from the Dutchman.
It was the sound of a driver trying to knit together a clean lap around a short, brutal circuit where traffic and timing can decide an entire weekend. On Saturday morning, Monza bit back.
Russell sets the pace as others trip over each other
Away from the drama, George Russell quietly put in the lap of the session.
The Mercedes driver topped FP3 with a 1:22.219, the benchmark of the morning and a clear statement ahead of qualifying. Hamilton slotted into second, 0.226 seconds down on his team-mate, with Verstappen 0.350s off Russell in third.
Even that headline time came with its own brush with controversy. Russell found himself under investigation for impeding Oscar Piastri after the McLaren driver arrived at Lesmo 1 to find a slow-moving Mercedes parked right on the apex, forced to back out of his own attempt.
Again, the stewards looked. Again, they waved it away. No further action for Russell or Piastri either.
So the timesheets stand: Russell leading a Mercedes one-two, Verstappen looming in third, and a simmering undercurrent of tension between the sport’s two heavyweight champions.
Practice at Monza is not supposed to feel like the opening lap of a title decider. Hamilton and Verstappen managed to make it look exactly like that.
