Fear shared that Lewis Hamilton sprint win may hurt Charles Leclerc relationship

One-time Formula 1 champion Jacques Villeneuve believes Lewis Hamilton’s emphatic victory in the Chinese Grand Prix sprint has the potential to damage his relationship with teammate Charles Leclerc.

While Leclerc has always been a poster boy of Ferrari having come through the junior ranks with the Scuderia’s support, the arrival of seven-time F1 champion Hamilton from Mercedes has shifted the dynamics within the team.

The first two race weekends of 2025 have proved to be tough for Ferrari, with the SF-25 not living up to the promise it showed in pre-season testing.

However, Hamilton scored an unlikely win from pole position in the half-distance race at Shanghai, boosting the morale at Maranello.

Villeneuve thinks that standout result in China could have consequences within the Ferrari garage, as its new signing has now beaten its protege to a first win of 2025.

“Lewis, having won a race, I'm not sure is very good for the relationship!” he told CardPlayer. 

“It really puts Lewis in a privileged place within the team. He was already the biggest name, the biggest star, and now he's the one who got a win for Ferrari when all the other races have been awful."

Villeneuve added: “He's won a sprint race. He's had a great start. Lewis got a pole in a sprint race and that's actually very good. It’s more than what people were expecting in the first two races. 

“His Saturday in China was incredible because it wasn't the best car, it wasn't a winning car, and he was really on it. He maximised the fact that he was on pole and controlled that sprint race.

“From what I heard Ferrari then made some changes for the actual race and it just wasn't as good but anyway, they got disqualified. It’s more a bad start to a season for Ferrari than it is for Lewis.”

Double Ferrari DSQ at F1 Chinese GP

Hamilton’s victory in the sprint was followed by a double disaster for Ferrari in the Chinese GP, with both its drivers disqualified from the race on technical grounds.

Leclerc’s car was found to be underweight by 1kg, while Hamilton was excluded from the results for excessive plank wear.

Villeneuve claimed Ferrari didn’t leave enough margin in a race where teams had no previous experience of running the new-for-2025 hard tyre.

“It happens. It happened to Mercedes last year with George Russell. One kilo, that’s rough, but that's the rules and they should have taken the tyres into account. 

“Nobody had tested the hard tyre. Lewis put on a new set. He did a two-stop, one of the only drivers to do so and it wasn’t underweight. Then Leclerc kept on driving on the same old tyres and ended up using more rubber than expected.

“I guess from the start they ran too close to the limit,” he explained. “Also Leclerc lost a piece of the front wing. That's weight. I don't know how much that piece of wing is, and I don't know if they can then add it back on or not.

“They could have thought about it, but that's also why the drivers drive on the dirty part of the track on the slowdown lap to pick up rubber to bring back and put some weight on the car. Maybe they didn't pick up enough rubber on the way down.

“And then Lewis, with the skid block hitting; the cars spend their whole race hitting the ground so the fact that the skid block was halved by 0.5 mm, that’s a lot. There’s really something strange with the set-up if they manage to eat so much of the skid.

“It's really hard to go through that. It’s really strange. They would have seen it in the sprint race so the setup change they made for that race was not the best.”