At Stowe the two Ferraris go through in different gears, and the shorter one isn't the quicker

At Stowe, corner fifteen, Charles Leclerc goes through in sixth and Lewis Hamilton drops to fifth: same Ferrari, same point of the lap, two different actions. It happens on the quickest stretch of Silverstone, four kilometres and nine from the line, where the two cars stop resembling each other.

Everyone remembers that Saturday for the front row: Kimi Antonelli on pole, the two Ferraris behind him, and a Friday in which the benchmark had been Hamilton, 1:29.260 in FP1, with Leclerc third by six tenths. Gear disagreements between team-mates, corner by corner, we counted thirteen across the whole grid in that qualifying session. Only one is between two Ferraris, and this is it.

Sky Sports, covering that Saturday, recalled that the home driver had beaten Antonelli in Friday's sprint qualifying before settling for third on the grid for the main race. The paddock was watching the front row. The telemetry, meanwhile, had already recorded the one point where the two men in the same team don't do the same thing.

The measurement is simple and repeated. Over six flying laps, Leclerc takes Stowe in sixth all six times; Hamilton in fifth on four of his five. The gear is taken as the mode in the window around the apex, where the true minimum speed falls, and to count as a disagreement both must be consistent with themselves on at least six laps out of ten. Here they are.

Then comes the paradox. The one who drops a gear doesn't gain through the corner: the minimum speed at the apex is 225 km/h for Leclerc in sixth and 220 km/h for Hamilton in fifth. Five km/h, and in favour of the longer gear. The engine speed tells the other half of the story: 1,368 rpm of difference, all on Hamilton's side, who at the slowest point of the corner is turning at 11,559 against his team-mate's 10,191.

Over a lap of Silverstone, five km/h in a single corner is worth a few thousandths, and a few thousandths at a single point don't separate from the noise of our measurements. The grid, that Saturday, didn't change because of this. The choice, though, is deliberate: it doesn't happen four times out of five by chance.

Why accept less speed at the apex? Stowe is taken on the aero platform, with the car loaded onto its outside and the rear that has to stay planted while the driver gets back on the throttle. A higher engine speed changes the response to the throttle at that moment: the shorter gear gives a more immediate and more modulable torque on exit, and it is consistent with the search for rotation in a corner where the car struggles to close. It is a reading, and it should be stated as such.

The limit should be stated too, because it matters: our feed has no ride-height channels and no yaw. We see the gear, the speed and the engine speed; we don't see how the rear behaves, and so we can't claim that Hamilton is buying rotation. We can say that the choice is consistent with that demand, and that Leclerc doesn't need it.

The Race, after the Silverstone sprint, reported that Leclerc doesn't find «the feeling» with this car and acknowledges that his team-mate extracts the maximum from it more often. If the two things are connected, the direction is the opposite of what you'd expect: at the quickest point of the lap it is Leclerc who carries more speed while staying in sixth, and it is Hamilton who is asking the car for something sixth doesn't give him.

The place to check is Blanchimont, a corner of the same profile: fast, on the aero platform, to be taken in the longest gear the rear will allow. If at Spa the two go through in the same gear, this reading falls and it remains an adaptation to Stowe. If instead Hamilton drops a gear again and again comes out with less speed at the apex, then the only Ferrari disagreement at Silverstone is a driving signature he carries with him track after track.