Hamilton at Ferrari: Is the Dream Fading?
The roar of the fans at the O2 Arena in London erupted at the sight of Lewis Hamilton’s unmistakable silhouette. The seven-time Formula 1 world champion, in his red suit and flanked by his new teammate Charles Leclerc and team boss Frédéric Vasseur, greeted the crowd with a radiant smile. It seemed like the beginning of something historic. Ferrari’s presentation in February, at the launch event of the F1 75 for pre-season, was the loudest of the ten teams, by a wide margin. Hamilton, excited about his move from Mercedes, a move that took a year to materialize, was joining the biggest team in the sport, in a title drought that extended to 2008. The 40-year-old English driver declared himself “revitalized” by his new challenge. He and Leclerc, after testing the new car at the Fiorano test track, were optimistic about the year. They even spent time playing online chess. The atmosphere, as the youngsters say, was unbeatable. Hamilton seemed like a reborn man. It seemed that Ferrari had added the final ingredient it was missing. But that was then. Now, the expectation and enthusiasm that Hamilton brought to Ferrari have disappeared so quickly that it’s hard to believe they ever existed. McLaren, which almost surpassed Ferrari in the constructors’ championship last year, has shown dominance. Hamilton’s victory in the China sprint race in April, and a few podiums for Leclerc, are all the Italian team has achieved in 2025 before the summer break. Both Mercedes and Red Bull, who are behind Ferrari in the standings, can boast a Grand Prix victory this year. The worst part is that Hamilton’s euphoria seems to have given way to total surrender. Anyone who has followed Ferrari’s rollercoaster in F1 could say that it only took the Italian team 14 races to destroy the morale of the best driver of all time. Perhaps Hamilton’s comments in Budapest, where he claimed to be “absolutely useless”, will be remembered as the result of this millionaire signing. Time will tell. On Sunday night, Hamilton seemed about to throw in the towel. “They probably need to change drivers,” Hamilton said on Saturday, after being eliminated in Q1, in a session in which Leclerc achieved pole. It was a remarkable statement from someone with a £60 million a year contract, the man with the most poles and victories of anyone. It’s fair to wonder what Ferrari president John Elkann, who ultimately shelled out that money to sign him, thought. After finishing in 12th place, his mood didn’t improve. He cryptically said that “there’s a lot going on in the background… that’s not good.” In response to a question about the Dutch Grand Prix, which follows the August break, he said: “I hope to be back, yes.” Ferrari’s home race, the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, a kind of pilgrimage for the team’s legendary tifosi, is held seven days later. Considering how things were a few months ago, it’s amazing to see how quickly they’ve changed. While Hamilton has repeatedly said his focus is on adapting completely in time for the 2026 regulation change, with which Ferrari hopes to be at the top, he neither speaks nor drives like a man capable of facing that challenge.Things didn’t go much better in the other Ferrari on Sunday. While Leclerc’s sublime lap in the pole position had provoked Hamilton’s comments, the development of his race was painfully familiar to anyone who has followed this team in the modern era. A race victory seemed possible, until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Ferrari fans know that feeling very well. Leclerc’s radio messages had a familiar tone.
Later he 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.” Leclerc was right. After leading the early stages of the race, his car’s pace plummeted at the end, and he fell to fourth place. Then he returned to what has become a well-rehearsed routine. After criticizing the team over the radio during the race, when facing the lights in the television press pen, Leclerc retracted his criticisms. “I spoke too quickly,” he said shortly after the checkered flag, pointing to a problem with the chassis 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 tiresome 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 has come out. But Ferrari can console itself with Leclerc’s incredible ability to pull something out of nothing. The same cannot be said of Hamilton. The Hungarian Grand Prix was a weekend with nothing positive to take away from the man in car number 44. Is Hamilton over? In the best-case scenario, Hamilton’s comments were very alarming. Whether seen on television or read later, 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 genuinely struggling to speak without breaking down.“We are going to lose this race because of these things. We are losing a lot of time,” he said at one point.
Leclerc
Just a week before the Belgian Grand Prix, Hamilton was defiant and confident. He told the media that he was determined not to follow the example of 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 in which 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 functioning of a team that lacks real experience in winning F1 titles at all levels. However, following that revelation, it’s difficult to escape the obvious fact. Two of Hamilton’s worst weekends at the wheel of a red car followed that revelation about the documents. A cynic could easily say that, while Alonso and Vettel didn’t win the grand prix for Enzo Ferrari’s team, they both won at the beginning of their debut season and left the team with a double-digit win count. Apart from that weekend in Shanghai, Hamilton hasn’t come close to doing any of those things.“That’s Lewis showing his heart,” 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 emotionally transparent since he was a young adult. He will blame himself.”
Toto Wolff
Perhaps that partly explains the last episode 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 pole positions of anyone ended his tenure with the Silver Arrows publicly stating that he had lost his one-lap magic.
The emotional rollercoaster has been evident this year. His pole and victory in the sprint in Shanghai turned out to be an ephemeral peak. After finishing fourth in Austria and then in Great Britain, setbacks in successive weekends in Belgium and Hungary upon reaching 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 growing defeatism. Vasseur has downplayed the situation.Numerous theories have been proposed to explain Hamilton’s problems this year. He has undoubtedly been openly 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 achieved pole position 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 adapt 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 this year, he and Sainz joked about how their new teams chart lap times in ways opposite to what they are used to, meaning they both started the year looking at data that seemed to be upside down. 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 greatest statistics the sport has ever seen. That Sainz, a multiple race winner, is struggling is irrelevant compared to a competitor with a legacy like Hamilton’s. Perhaps the difficulties of 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 to give his struggling replacement, the Italian teenager Kimi Antonelli, an encouraging boost. But it came after a series of equally frank comments made to the media after being eliminated from Q1 in both the sprint qualifying 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 change things. Ferrari could come out as the team to beat next season, but after Budapest, the question is not so much whether Ferrari can give him a title-winning car, but whether he still believes he is a driver who can win with one. Of all the problems at Ferrari, that might be the most alarming of all.“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 feel very disappointed and the first reaction is harsh, but we all know that we are pushing in the same direction.”
Frédéric Vasseur
