Ferrari left Monza with more questions than points, and Juan Pablo Montoya believes the answers now have to come from the very top of the organisation.
On a day when Mercedes celebrated a crushing 1-2 led by a sensational Kimi Antonelli charge from 19th on the grid, Ferrari’s home race disintegrated within two laps. The tifosi came for a red coronation. They got a public unravelling.
It started at Turn 1.
Lewis Hamilton lunged down the inside of Charles Leclerc into the first chicane, then tried to hang on around the outside of Turn 2. Leclerc held his line. Hamilton ran out of room, skipped through the gravel and tumbled down the order to 10th. One corner, and Ferrari’s carefully laid plans were already in pieces.
The tension didn’t ease. It snapped.
On lap two, with Leclerc locked in battle with McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, the Monegasque ran wide onto the kerb on the exit of Parabolica. The car snapped away. He speared into the barriers and out of the Italian Grand Prix. Hamilton, recovering from the opening-lap drama, eventually salvaged sixth, but it felt like a hollow result on a day when Mercedes controlled the race and Antonelli extended his title lead.
From the outside, it looked like a team eating itself at its own temple.
Speaking to F1 TV after the race, Hamilton, currently third in the drivers’ championship, called the outcome “a tough one to swallow”. For Montoya, watching on as a pundit, the issue went beyond a messy Sunday. He saw a structural problem that now demands intervention.
“They need to go to not only Fred but above Fred and sit them down,” Montoya said, referring to team principal Fred Vasseur and Ferrari’s senior hierarchy. “Both of them need to go to Maranello this week, and they need to sit down and have a proper talk because, 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. Leclerc insists he treated Hamilton as he would any rival. Montoya argues that, at Ferrari, that logic cannot stand. Not when both drivers are supposed to be the spearhead of a title project. Not when Mercedes are walking away from Monza with maximum points and a teenager in Antonelli stretching the field.
The numbers tell their own story.
Hamilton’s sixth place leaves him 10 points behind second-placed George Russell in the standings and 76 adrift of championship leader Antonelli. Leclerc, fifth in the table on 155 points, now trails Antonelli by 112. Those gaps are not the product of one bad afternoon, but Monza felt like a turning point all the same.
This week, the paddock heads to Madrid for the Spanish Grand Prix. Montoya’s message is that Ferrari cannot simply turn the page and hope it all goes away. He wants Hamilton and Leclerc in Maranello, in front of Vasseur and the executives above him, with clear lines drawn on how far team-mates can push each other when the stakes are this high.
Ferrari came to Monza dreaming of a statement win. They left with a different kind of statement: a public reminder that without hard boundaries and hard conversations, even the most famous team in Formula 1 can lose control of its own story.
