Disqualification, extra tangles together with his race engineer and outdone by his hampered teammate… after Lewis Hamilton’s depressing Chinese Grand Prix, JONATHAN McEVOY asks the query on each Formula One fan’s lips

So this was the dream, was it?

You wait a lifetime to join Ferrari, they raid the bank to the tune of £60million a year, and you jointly plot winning an eighth world title at the grand old sporting age of 40-plus.

And then this.

It is difficult to think of a less propitious start to the marriage of Lewis Hamilton and the world’s most famous team, and the season is only two races in.

The latest blow in the early days of the partnership emerged when Hamilton was disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix for driving a car too low to the ground. Post-race checks found that the rear skid – in the car’s wooden plank – was variously 8.5mm and 8.6mm thick. The minimum requirement is 9mm.

It is a cigarette paper to a smoker, but enough to generate a slither of extra downforce in the most technically advanced sport of miniscule margins.

You could call it cheating. However, the illegality was not deemed deliberate by the stewards so that assessment may be harsh. But it offered at least a theoretical advantage, though Hamilton’s sixth-place finish in a race won by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri tells you not enough of one.

This was all a vivid embarrassment to turn Ferrari faces pucer than their overalls. And the error stands in a long litany of faux pas by an organisation that has been adept in recent years at shooting themselves in the foot.

For all their riches and heritage, they have not won a drivers’ title since 2007, Hamilton’s own debut season for McLaren. It was nearly half his lifetime ago.

The disqualification, along with team-mate Charles Leclerc’s for being underweight, is not the only hiccup to beset the Scuderia in the two races Hamilton has spent in scarlet. Other than the hype and hoopla, nothing has gone quite as sparklingly as it ought to have done.

It was already a tricky day for Hamilton even before the KO arrived in a dark paddock three hours or so after the race was over.

Even if his race in China was an improvement on his fortunes in Melbourne a week before, when he finished 10th, then only up to a point, Lord Copper. Again, he had a lively exchange with his race engineer Riccardo Adami (though Ferrari claim the conversations were taken out of context, and they are hardly X-rated it must be said). More dispiritingly, he had to make way for Leclerc.

These are hardly optimum scenarios when you have been signed as the GOAT. We are not talking here about a sophomore, but a seven-time world champion.

Having to switch places was even more wounding for Hamilton because Leclerc’s front wing was flapping about, perhaps even grazing the ground (after the two touched on lap one, as Leclerc was grappling with Max Verstappen). 

In a sport where every well-honed component is a potential aerodynamic eureka moment, as events later in the night highlighted, Leclerc’s fluttering bodywork was surely a handicap to the Monegasque rather than an upgrade.

Long before lap 20 of 57 when Hamilton and his pit wall were debating whether their trophy recruit should move aside, it was obvious that Leclerc possessed the greater speed.

Hamilton knew it, saying in a spirit of cooperation: ‘I think I’m going to let Charles through because I’m struggling.’

(That line was not broadcast on TV. Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur was furious. ‘This is a joke from FOM,’ referring to Formula One Management, who supply the radio exchanges, saying they did it for the ‘show’ as if to give the impression it was the team, not Hamilton, who initiated the move.)

Adami replied: ‘We are swapping cars at Turn 14.’ (Which was broadcast.)

Hamilton: ‘I’ll let Charles through when he’s closer.’

Hamilton, again: ‘I’m closing up a little bit (on Russell ahead of him).’

Adami: ‘Can we swap this lap?’

Hamilton, perhaps annoyed by the insistence from the pit wall: ‘I’ll tell you when we can swap.’

Hamilton made way for Leclerc at the start of lap 21. Leclerc, unimpressed by being held up, said: ‘This is a shame. The pace is there.’

Leclerc went on to finish fifth, Hamilton sixth (23 and 25 seconds behind Piastri), both having been passed by Red Bull’s Verstappen, who came fourth. Hamilton spent the afternoon off the pace in what up to this point had been a curate’s egg of a weekend for him. He won the sprint on Saturday from pole with composure and adroit tyre management. We wondered then if that would be a flash in the pan or a sign of sustained success to come.

Given Ferrari’s unprecedented double disqualification, we must have our doubts. This was a deeply embarrassing day for all concerned with the Scuderia, not least Vasseur. The Frenchman must be feeling hot under the collar, from the Italian press, his chairman John Elkann, and the Tifosi.

Hamilton’s body language at the end of the 57 laps implied he was somewhat downcast, and that was before the stewards summoned him at 7.15pm, eight minutes before they slam-dunked their verdict.

Comparing Saturday and Sunday, Hamilton said: ‘The car was massively different. I struggled today. I had no rear end and the car wasn’t turning in the low speed.’

He is calling for patience in any assessment of his Ferrari sojourn, saying that contending with a new engine, new environment and new methods takes time.

Indeed, after securing his sprint victory, he criticised as ‘yapping’ those pundits who stated the obvious, namely that Melbourne was a flop for him. ‘By any metric,’ opined Sky’s Martin Brundle.

Well, perhaps Hamilton could console himself in the knowledge that we judge him by the stratospheric standards he has set for himself in a career that has rewritten practically every record in Formula One.

In Melbourne he had complained that Adami was force-feeding him too much information. Here, the opposite. ‘Give me some feedback, guys,’ he implored Adami. ‘Come on, I need some feedback on where I am losing (time).’

‘Exit of 13,’ Adami informed him.

‘You told me that already,’ Hamilton snapped back.

Ferrari are not where they need to be to fight for a title, or to restore lost lustre. They may get there. But in the fanfare over Hamilton joining, with all the PR razzmatazz and choreographed photoshoots, did they focus unremittingly where they needed to, on track?

On the increasingly dismaying evidence of the season’s beginnings the answer is ‘No’.