Uncovered: Telemetry exposes huge cost of Lewis Hamilton’s late-race drama in Austin

After a fantastic start to the United States Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton was comfortably holding P4 for almost the entire race, maintaining a safe gap to Oscar Piastri behind him — right up until the final lap.

What looked like a relatively calm afternoon suddenly turned into a late-race fight for fourth place with just a few corners remaining, after Lewis thought he had suffered a front-right puncture. Telemetry data helps us understand what really happened.

A late-race scare for Lewis Hamilton at the United States GP

Starting from P5, Hamilton got off the line brilliantly, making up a place on George Russell who was ahead of him. The seven-time world champion smartly took a wide line into Turn 1, anticipating a bottleneck at the apex. It allowed him to avoid the fight between Russell and Piastri and emerge ahead of both.

He then settled into P4, where he remained for the majority of the race. Scuderia Ferrari showed strong pace in Austin, which enabled Hamilton to keep Piastri comfortably behind him.

But in the final lap, similar to what happened a week earlier in Singapore, a mechanical issue suddenly brought fresh drama to the race.

Since this moment wasn’t shown during the live broadcast, what we can see from Hamilton’s onboard is a clear drop in speed just after Turn 4. His immediate reaction was to report a puncture on the front-right tyre over team radio.

Telemetry confirms that between T4 and T5, Hamilton briefly lifted and braked. Comparing this lap with the previous one shows a significant drop in speed through this fast section of the track.

This slower, uncertain driving continued all the way to Turn 11 — more than enough time for Piastri, who had been over five seconds behind, to close the gap to just two seconds.

However, from Turn 11 onwards the problem suddenly seemed to disappear. Hamilton’s pace through the final corners was almost identical to the laps before the incident, except for a slight loss of speed through Turn 19.

Crucially, he managed to hold on to P4, crossing the line just over a second ahead of Piastri.

So what caused the problem?

After the race, Hamilton explained that his first thought was that he’d suffered a puncture because he suddenly lost front-end downforce. This caused “terrible understeer”, forcing him to slow down through the high-speed section to keep control of the car.

Unfortunately, based on the available data, it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of the issue. Whatever it was, it seemed to resolve itself quickly. It appears Hamilton slowed down out of caution — reacting to the sudden understeer that tends to be more pronounced in high-speed corners.

Realising the car was still drivable, he got back up to speed just in time to defend the position.

In the end, Hamilton’s timing was just good enough to protect P4. The weekend turned out to be a successful one for Ferrari, as the team collected a strong haul of points — closing the gap to Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team in the Constructors’ Championship.

Read next: US GP conclusions: Verstappen’s big chance, more Piastri evidence, Ferrari culture clash