Montoya warns Ferrari: Intervention needed after Monza meltdown
Ferrari came to Monza expecting a celebration. They left with a headache, a wrecked car, and a very public warning from one of racing’s most outspoken voices.
Juan Pablo Montoya believes the situation is now serious enough that Ferrari’s top brass must intervene from above team principal Fred Vasseur to lay down clear rules between Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, after a chaotic Italian Grand Prix ripped through the team’s home weekend.
A home race that fell apart in two laps
The tifosi arrived to see red on the podium. They got silver instead.
On a day Mercedes scored a crushing 1-2, led by a sensational Kimi Antonelli charge from 19th on the grid, Ferrari’s race imploded almost as soon as the lights went out.
Into Turn 1, Hamilton lunged down the inside of Leclerc, then tried to hang on around the outside of Turn 2. Leclerc held his line. Hamilton ran out of road, bounced through the gravel, and tumbled down to 10th.
The tension spiked. The home grand prix was barely seconds old, and Ferrari’s two star signings had already brushed up against the limits of what a team can tolerate between team-mates.
The real damage came a lap later.
Defending from McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, Leclerc ran wide onto the kerb on the exit of Parabolica. The Ferrari snapped away from him and went straight into the barriers. Game over. The crowd that came to roar for a Ferrari fightback watched one of their cars buried in the wall and the other recovering from an opening-lap clash.
Hamilton salvaged sixth at the flag. It felt like a consolation prize on a day when Mercedes locked out the top two steps of the podium.
“Go above Fred”: Montoya calls for intervention
Speaking on F1 TV, Hamilton, currently third in the drivers’ standings, called the outcome a “tough one to swallow”. The phrase could have been stamped across Ferrari’s entire Sunday.
Montoya did not dance around the issue. He went straight for the heart of Ferrari’s internal politics.
“They need to go to not only Fred but above Fred and sit them down,” he said, arguing that Vasseur and Ferrari’s senior hierarchy must bring Hamilton and Leclerc to Maranello this week for a serious debrief before the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid.
“Both of them need to go to Maranello this week, and they need to sit down and have a proper talk,” Montoya explained, highlighting Leclerc’s post-race stance. “In my opinion, Charles came out and said, ‘I raced Lewis like I would have raced anybody else.’ But it’s your team-mate, and you’ve got to respect your team-mate, and you’ve got to respect the team.”
That is the crux of it. Leclerc insists he treated Hamilton as just another rival. Montoya insists that, at Ferrari, there is no such thing as “just another rival” when the other car is painted the same shade of red.
Title picture shifts as Ferrari stumble
Behind the drama, the numbers tell their own story.
Hamilton’s sixth place leaves him 10 points behind second-placed George Russell in the championship and 76 adrift of leader Antonelli, whose Monza masterclass from 19th underlined exactly why he sits at the top of the table.
Leclerc’s crash was even more costly. He remains fifth on 155 points, now 112 behind Antonelli. For a team that arrived at its home race needing a statement, Monza delivered one — just not the one Ferrari wanted.
Now comes the hard part: not repairing the car, but repairing the relationship. The next serious move will not be made on track, but in a meeting room in Maranello, where Ferrari’s hierarchy must decide how much freedom their two heavyweights really have when the stakes are this high.
