Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari: The right move at the wrong time?
Is Lewis Hamilton's swap to Scuderia Ferrari the right move at the wrong time?
The F1 2025 season is the first for Lewis Hamilton as a Scuderia Ferrari driver, and as he addressed team staff for the first time, he offered one telling phrase: “I’ve been waiting for this day forever.”
But is it a matter of “right move, wrong time” for Hamilton? Has the driver achieved a dream too late in his career to secure that coveted eighth World Championship? Our writers at PlanetF1.com discuss.
Any time is the right time for Lewis Hamilton
There’s no time like the present for Lewis Hamilton to achieve a childhood dream.
Much has been made about the move to Ferrari — particularly as it pertains to Hamilton’s age. The seven-time World Champion turned 40 this January; in all of F1 history, only three drivers have wrapped up a title after that critical milestone: Jack Brabham (1966; at 40 years, five months, and two days of age), Nino Farina (1950; at 43 years, 10 months, and four days of age), and Juan Manuel Fangio (1957; he was 46 years, one month, and 11 days). Is it even possible for a driver in the modern era to win a championship at that age?
I’d argue that for Hamilton, it doesn’t matter.
While an eighth World Championship is likely always in the back of his mind, Lewis Hamilton remains one of the most successful drivers in F1’s 75 years of existence. He’s cleared enough records to guarantee his place in the history books, even if F1 continues for another 75 years. He doesn’t need an eighth title to justify the success of his career.
Rather, this move seems to be a worthwhile career move in and of itself for Hamilton; after all, who wouldn’t want to race for the oldest team in F1? Ferrari is in position to secure race wins throughout 2025, and Hamilton will have a chance to celebrate a victory tifosi style. In my eyes, the team swap is worth it for that alone.
Still Hamilton rises? Let’s hope it’s true
I believe the saying is ‘a day late and a dollar short’. Okay, maybe not the dollars, not if reports of Lewis Hamilton’s 50 to 55 million salary are to be believed, but definitely a day late. And probably a year.
For many years, and often it felt like too many, Hamilton was the bane of the Tifosi’s existence as the Briton took one World title after another away from Fernando Alonso and then Sebastian Vettel.
And then he and Mercedes became fallible. And what a fall it was. From championship winners, world beaters, the dominance to end all dominance, Hamilton struggled in the new ground-effect era, as too did Mercedes.
As one season followed a second without a race win, even when two wins came in 2024, Hamilton’s head dropped. Yes, he said the right words in the press conferences about pulling through, fighting together, blah, blah, but there were times when he was in the car that his despondency rang out loud.
That’s not the Hamilton of yesteryear. That’s not the Hamilton that thwarted Ferrari time and again.
But more worrying were his qualifying performances in 2024. Performances that had even Hamilton saying he was “definitely not fast anymore”. The driver with the most pole positions ever in Formula 1, who had only once pre-2024 lost to a team-mate in a qualy head-to-head, went down 5-19, which if you include Sprint qualy became 6-24, to George Russell. It was a shocking stat, and also only the second time in his 18-year F1 career that Hamilton did not bag a pole position.
It says a lot. I fear it says a lot more than that too.
While one could put Hamilton’s 2024 decline down to a driver who was saying goodbye and dealing with all those end-of-a-relationship emotions and who perhaps dropped his, and one could also say he will find renewed vigour, vim, vitality, and vooma [a South African word] with his new Ferrari adventure, one could do a lot of things.
But the question is: can Hamilton ‘still I rise’? I wonder. I hope. And I’m sure the Tifosi pray.
Mercedes’ words over Hamilton’s continued improvements are telling
Hamilton will no doubt be taking inspiration from the longevity of his former team-mate in Fernando Alonso as an example of how he has seemingly lost little to none of his pace into his 40s.
Every person is different, however, though this subject reminds me of quotes from Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin last year that explained what Hamilton does that seems to mark him out from other drivers.
When asked to compare the Hamilton that was leaving Mercedes to the one who joined, Shovlin told the Beyond the Grid podcast: “Every year he was with this team, he would go away for the winter, he had a great awareness of where he could improve himself, and he would come back in in January a stronger driver.
“One of the things that that allowed Lewis to win so many championships was that, when he won another, it wasn’t like he took his foot off the gas and went and enjoyed himself over the winter. There would be such a focus on, where can I find the next step?
“And for him, it all comes from this fear of being overtaken, fear of losing, that he just wanted to make sure that he would come back a stronger, more rounded, more effective, more unbeatable driver the next year.”
There will have been no greater motivation, then, to prove himself right and any doubters wrong that moving to Ferrari was the right thing by not only winning races, but an eighth title as well.
I wrote recently that I have always found it an admirable trait of his career that he has not shied away from going against top-tier team-mates in Formula 1, and there is no doubting that Charles Leclerc will be another this time around.
Right move? Absolutely. As for the timing, the jury is still out for me. If anyone can make it work, though, Hamilton has proven over time that he can.
Lewis Hamilton has a one-year window to win an eighth F1 title
To judge the success of Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari career purely on results would be to look at this move the wrong way.
After the years of underachievement at Mercedes following the trauma of Abu Dhabi 2021, at the root of his move to Ferrari is an acknowledgement that he badly needed a change of scenery and an opportunity to breathe different air with the hope of ending his F1 career on a sweeter note.
It is the first real sign of Hamilton consciously considering his lasting legacy and how he wants to finish his time in F1.
He has potentially timed his move to perfection, arriving at Ferrari after their most productive season in some time in 2024.
And with Fred Vasseur recently revealing that Project 677 will be a “completely new” car, there is more than a touch of 2021-spec Red Bull – a team prepared to throw everything at the final year of the existing rules – about Ferrari in 2025.
Yet what if Hamilton does not capitalise on this one-year window to finally seize an eighth World Championship this year?
Then the pangs of regret could come. Then his decision to join Ferrari a year ago will risk looking a little rash, driven too much by emotion and the frustration of a bad 2023.
The general consensus for 2026, after all, is that Mercedes will re-emerge as F1’s dominant force under the new rules with their confidence for the sport’s new era reminiscent of their last successful spell from 2014.
Could it be that Hamilton has walked away from Mercedes just as the team were about to rise again, denying himself a clear run to that elusive eighth title in 2026 and – worse – opening the door for Max Verstappen to stroll into his old team and win the lot?
There’s only one way for him to avoid that worst-case scenario. It’s now or never.
Read next: The last time an F1 icon tested for Ferrari: Hamilton follows in Vettel’s footsteps
