14 Jun 2026
Lewis Hamilton won the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona, his first victory since joining Ferrari, out-strategising Mercedes' George Russell across a three-stop race — a result the seven-time champion later called part of a season running well above his own expectations.
Lewis Hamilton won the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona-Catalunya on 14 June, beating George Russell's Mercedes by 19.561 seconds after a three-stop strategy that took him from a soft-tyre opening stint through hard and medium compounds across 66 laps. It was Hamilton's first Formula 1 victory since he joined Ferrari, ending a run without a podium finish in his debut season with the team the year before.
Russell started from pole but could not match Hamilton's pace once the stops cycled through, finishing second on a simpler two-stop strategy. Lando Norris was third for McLaren, ahead of Max Verstappen's Red Bull and McLaren's Oscar Piastri in fifth.
The result was the clearest evidence yet that Hamilton had found his footing in red. Reflecting on his season in early August, Hamilton rated his own form as 'slightly above average, maybe' — a modest assessment for a driver who, according to Motorsport Week, followed the Barcelona win with four further podium finishes and had not finished outside the top six all season by the summer break, a run of consistency that kept him ahead of both Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc and his former Mercedes teammate Russell in the standings.
It marked a striking reversal from Hamilton's first year at Ferrari, in which he failed to reach a single grand prix podium — the first time that had happened in a 20-year career. The Barcelona win, and the run of results that followed it, put Hamilton firmly into second in the drivers' championship by the summer break, behind only Kimi Antonelli.
According to F1-Fansite's standings coverage, the victory also extended Hamilton's own all-time record for grand prix wins and podium finishes — records he already held before the season began, now simply padded further in a Ferrari car he had struggled to extract results from a year earlier. For a seven-time champion who spent his first year in red without a single podium, a maiden win on merit, on strategy, against a Mercedes he knows intimately, carried weight well beyond the 25 points.
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Four seasons after their last title, Mercedes have won eight of the first eleven 2026 races and lead both championships comfortably at the summer break — with rookie-turned-contender Kimi Antonelli out front and George Russell third, their strongest form since the end of the hybrid-dominance era.
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