Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari during practice at the 2025 Japan Grand Prix (file photo, not from São Paulo). Image credit: Liauzh/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Five seconds is all the stewards took from Charles Leclerc at Interlagos. It was enough to hand Liam Lawson seventh place and strip two points from Ferrari. But the penalty is the smallest part of Ferrari’s São Paulo story. The weekend was largely decided on Saturday, by power-unit penalties that pushed both cars deep into the field. The late contact with Lawson simply collected the change.
The stewards punished what the contact bought, not how hard it was
On the penultimate lap, Leclerc tapped the left-rear of Lawson’s Racing Bulls at Turn 12 and completed the pass at Turn 3. In Document 79, the stewards accepted Leclerc’s description of the contact as minor. They penalised him anyway, ruling that it disrupted Lawson and let Leclerc pull alongside from further back, an “obvious sporting consequence.” Lawson argued that the contact damaged his rear-left rim and that he had the right to the corner under the Driving Standards Guidelines. The wet conditions and the minor nature of the contact are why the penalty was five seconds rather than ten.
My read: “it was only a tap” is a defence that rarely works, because the test is not force. It is whether the contact bought a position. If the move only exists because of the touch, expect to pay for it.
1.8 seconds on the road, 3.2 seconds in the book
The official classification already has the penalty applied: Lawson is 75.402 seconds behind winner Lando Norris, Leclerc 78.586. Take the five seconds back off and Leclerc crossed the line about 1.8 seconds ahead of Lawson. With it, he finished 3.2 seconds behind. That swing moved Leclerc from seventh (six points) to eighth (four) and gave Racing Bulls two extra points.
Ferrari left Brazil with six points: Leclerc’s four and two for Lewis Hamilton’s ninth place, a lap down. Mercedes took 22 through George Russell’s fourth and Kimi Antonelli’s fifth, and clinched the constructors’ title. Before the weekend, we flagged that Mercedes needed only a three-point edge on Ferrari to get it done. It got sixteen.
Ferrari’s real loss came on Saturday
The official starting grid shows a 10-place penalty for Leclerc and a 75-place penalty for Hamilton, both for additional power-unit elements. The same sheet lists Leclerc’s qualifying time as 1:28.289, 0.032 seconds quicker than Lawson’s 1:28.321, and Lawson lined up third. On those numbers, Leclerc had the pace to start in front of the driver he ended up fighting for seventh.
Instead he started in the middle of the pack, in a race that began wet, dried out and turned damp again late. That is a poor place to go shopping for overtakes. We have been tracking Ferrari’s engine penalty bill since Leclerc’s Monza crash, and in my view Interlagos is where the invoice got expensive.
Hamilton’s afternoon followed the same pattern. Starting 20th, he was investigated for leaving the track and gaining an advantage, gave a place back to Haas’s Oliver Bearman to avoid a penalty, and finished ninth.
Three five-second penalties, three kinds of risk
Leclerc’s was one of three five-second penalties after the race. Bearman was penalised for releasing from his stop into Leclerc’s path in the pit lane, and Antonelli for a release that put him in the path of Alpine’s Franco Colapinto. Antonelli stayed fifth and Bearman was classified 17th.
Mixed conditions squeeze everything: tyre calls, pit-lane traffic, last-lap risk. The stewards’ answer in all three cases was the lowest tier of time penalty, and in Leclerc’s case they said explicitly that the wet was a mitigating factor. That discount is worth remembering the next time rain arrives.
What to watch in Las Vegas
The next round is Las Vegas, November 20–22, and Ferrari’s question is a dull one: can it start where its pace says it should? Interlagos showed there was speed to be found on Saturday, and Sunday’s late scrap over two points showed how little room a team has for error when it starts from the wrong end of the grid. Power-unit penalties are a bill teams choose to run up. At Interlagos, Ferrari ran it up on both cars and paid at both ends of the weekend.
Lead image credit: Liauzh/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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