Hamilton’s Anímic Descent at Ferrari: A Premature End?
Lewis Hamilton’s arrival at Ferrari generated unprecedented anticipation. The presentation of the seven-time Formula 1 world champion, along with his new teammate Charles Leclerc and team principal Frédéric Vasseur, was met with enthusiasm. The beginning of a new era was glimpsed, with Hamilton joining the most iconic team in the sport, eager to break a title drought that had been going on since 2008.
After its promising start, euphoria has given way to uncertainty. McLaren, which last year came close to surpassing Ferrari in the constructors’ championship, has emerged as the dominant team. Hamilton’s victory in the Chinese sprint race and a few podium finishes by Leclerc are Ferrari’s only notable achievements so far this season. Meanwhile, both Mercedes and Red Bull, who are behind Ferrari in the standings, can boast of Grand Prix victories this year.
Hamilton’s disappointment seems to have reached a critical point. His comments in Budapest, where he described himself as “absolutely useless”, could be remembered as the turning point of this ambitious project. After being eliminated in Q1, Hamilton expressed his displeasure, suggesting the need for a change of drivers. These statements, coming from a driver with a millionaire contract and an unparalleled winning record, sounded alarming.
After finishing in 12th position, his mood did not improve. He stated that “there are many things happening in the background… that are not good.” When questioned about the Dutch Grand Prix, which follows the August break, he responded cautiously: “I hope to return, yes.” Ferrari’s home race, the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, is scheduled for a week later.
Given the situation from a few months ago, it’s surprising to see how quickly things have changed. Although Hamilton has reiterated that his focus is on adapting to the rule changes of 2026, he is not speaking or driving like someone capable of facing that challenge.
The situation in the other Ferrari was a little better on Sunday. While Leclerc’s pole lap drew comments from Hamilton, the way his race unfolded was painfully familiar to anyone who has followed this team in the modern era. It was a race win that seemed tantalizingly possible, until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Ferrari fans will know that feeling very well.
“We are going to lose this race with these things. We are losing a lot of time,” he said at one point. He later added: “This is incredibly frustrating. We have lost all competitiveness. You just have to listen to me… It’s a miracle if we finish on the podium.”
Charles Leclerc
Leclerc was right. After leading the early stages of the race, the pace of his car plummeted at the end, and he inevitably fell to fourth place.
Then he returned to what has become a well-rehearsed trick at this point. After having criticized the team over the radio during the race, when faced with the light in the television press stand, he retracted his criticisms. “I spoke too quickly,” he said shortly after the checkered flag, pointing to a chassis problem and not the configuration changes in the final pit stop that he felt had ruined the pace he had had all weekend. The explanation might have been valid, but the routine of criticizing and retracting is a bit tiring at this point. It only reinforced the persistent feeling that in Leclerc, Ferrari has a mega-talented boy who is hard on the team when he speaks in the sanctuary of the cockpit, but less so once he comes out.
But Ferrari can at least console themselves with Leclerc’s incredible ability to make something out of nothing. The same cannot be said of Hamilton. The Hungarian Grand Prix was a weekend where there were no positives to take from the man in car number 44.
Is Hamilton over?
In the best-case scenario, Hamilton’s comments were very alarming. Whether seen as he said them on television or read after the fact, they seemed to have been uttered by someone who was considering waving the white flag and giving up right there. At one point in his interview with Sky Sports F1 on Sunday night, he seemed to be really struggling to speak without breaking down.The image shows Lewis Hamilton, who looked defeated after the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday, where he finished in a disappointing 12th place.
Anyone who has followed Hamilton’s career could recognize it as part of the emotional range that has made him such a captivating part of the sport for so long. His pendulum of emotions has always been of absolute extremes. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, who along with Hamilton built the greatest dynasty the sport has ever seen, acknowledged this when asked about it on Sunday night.
“That’s Lewis wearing his heart on his sleeve,” said Wolff. “It was very raw. He was disappointed with himself. We’ve had it in the past when he felt he hadn’t met his own expectations. He’s been so emotionally transparent since he was a young adult. He will beat himself up.”
Just a week before the Belgian Grand Prix, Hamilton had been in good spirits, defiant and confident. He told the media how he was determined not to follow the example of his colleagues, the legends Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel, by not winning a championship for Ferrari. Hamilton revealed that he had been writing documents for the team highlighting the areas where he was underperforming. It was exactly the kind of thing that Ferrari should be grateful for: a man with so much experience pointing out the flaws in the operation of a team that lacks real experience in obtaining F1 titles at all levels.
However, in the wake of that revelation, it’s hard to escape the obvious fact. Two of Hamilton’s worst weekends driving a red car followed that revelation about the documents. A cynic could easily say that, while Alonso and Vettel ultimately didn’t claim the big one for Enzo Ferrari’s team, both won early in their debut season and left the team with double-digit win counts. Aside from that weekend in Shanghai, Hamilton hasn’t seemed close to doing any of those things.
Perhaps that helps explain the latest attack of emotional transparency to which Wolff alluded. Mercedes saw a lot of that in the years following Hamilton’s agonizing 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. In the last months of his tenure with the team last year, even with the emotional excitement of his wonderful victory at the 2024 British Grand Prix, self-doubt was clear. The man with the most poles of anyone ended his tenure with the Silver Arrows publicly declaring that he had lost his previous one-lap magic.
The emotional rollercoaster has been evident this year. His pole and victory in the sprint race in Shanghai proved to be a brief high point. After finishing fourth in Austria and then in Great Britain, setbacks in successive weekends in Belgium and Hungary, entering the summer break, have moved the needle towards the wrong end of the scale.
Externally, Ferrari has not shown any persistent concern about Hamilton’s spiraling form and his increasing defeatism. Vasseur has downplayed the situation.
“I don’t need to motivate him,” Vasseur said on Sunday evening. “Honestly, he is frustrated, but not demotivated… Sometimes, right after the race or right after qualifying, you are very disappointed and the first reaction is harsh, but we all know that we are pushing in the same direction.”
Numerous theories have been put forward to explain Hamilton’s difficulties this year. Without a doubt, he has outwardly become frustrated on numerous occasions by Ferrari’s race strategy; his interactions with race engineer Riccardo Adami often sound more like two incompatible people on an awkward blind date than a Formula 1 racing driver and a race engineer, but it is unfair to simply point to Ferrari, especially after a weekend in which his teammate was on pole and should have finished on the podium.
The problems go beyond Budapest. Hamilton’s form simply hasn’t been at the level everyone expected. The timing of his team change could be an explanation. A trend this year has been how, in the last year of the regulation cycle, drivers have struggled to switch to new cars; Carlos Sainz, who had to make way for Hamilton at Ferrari, has been equally inconsistent at Williams.
Hamilton has spoken about how different things are at Ferrari compared to Mercedes. Earlier in the year, he and Sainz joked about how their new teams chart lap times in the opposite way to what they are used to, meaning they both started the year looking at data that seemed to be backwards. While that might be the case, Hamilton’s achievements and his legacy to this point serve as a double-edged sword: even if it’s a bad time to have switched teams, the excuse doesn’t work when you boast the best statistics the sport has ever seen. The fact that Sainz, a multiple race winner, is struggling is irrelevant compared to a competitor with a legacy like Hamilton’s.
Perhaps the difficulties in English at Hungaroring, the scene of his first victory with Mercedes in 2013 and a place considered one of his strongest circuits, reinforced the feeling that he simply hasn’t been able to make the difference he used to make in his old team.
There was much talk of a visit Hamilton made to Mercedes at Spa-Francorchamps, seven days before the race in Budapest. Both Hamilton and Mercedes said it was simply a visit to catch up with old colleagues and give his struggling replacement, Italian teenager Kimi Antonelli, a pat on the back. But it came after a series of equally frank comments to the media after being eliminated from Q1 in qualifying for both the sprint race and the Grand Prix. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, at a time of such low confidence, Hamilton sought the familiarity of his championship days, even if only for a fleeting visit.
All of this would have seemed unthinkable to the crowd at the O2 Arena in February. The atmosphere, which was once so good, is now sour.
Hamilton still has time to turn things around. Ferrari could still come out of the blocks as the team to beat next season, but after Budapest, the question isn’t so much whether Ferrari can give him a title-winning car, but whether he still believes he’s a driver who can win with one. Of all the problems at Ferrari, that might be the most alarming of all.
