Why Lewis Hamilton’s Move to Ferrari’s Formula 1 Team Matters
The biggest moment of the 2024 Formula 1 season wasn’t when Max Verstappen clinched his fourth-straight driver’s title in Las Vegas. It wasn’t when McLaren clinched the constructor’s title, its first in 26 years, at Abu Dhabi, either. In fact, it didn’t happen on any of the competition’s racetracks.
Instead, that moment occurred on February 1, four weeks before the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix. That was the day that Scuderia Ferrari flipped the sport on its head with an announcement so unexpected it almost made the season that followed an afterthought. All it took was the following 20 words:
“Scuderia Ferrari is pleased to announce that Lewis Hamilton will be joining the team in 2025, on a multi-year contract.”
Fast forward 13 months and the Hamilton-Ferrari union is officially underway, with this past weekend’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix now in the books. The race didn’t go at all how driver or team would have hoped. Some questionable late-race maneuvering saw Hamilton finish tenth, nine spots back of McLaren’s Lando Norris, eight spots behind longtime rival Verstappen, and seven spots worse than former Mercedes-AMG Petronas teammate, George Russell. He even trailed teammate Charles Leclerc, who came in eighth. But since over a quarter of the field failed to finish the rain-soaked race, maybe a point is okay
“Definitely a big crash course today,” Hamilton said after the race. “I’m just grateful I kept it out of the wall.”
Still, Australia is just one race, leaving Hamilton and Ferrari with 23 more rounds to work things out. No matter what happens, the move remains momentous. Here’s why:
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The Biggest of Shocks
Image Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images Formula 1 has seen its fair share of big team changes over the decades—Emerson Fittipaldi leaving McLaren to start his own team, Ayrton Senna trading McLaren for Williams, and Michael Schumacher going from Benetton to Ferrari—but nothing like this. This is arguably the sport’s greatest driver joining forces with its most successful team in a bid to set the driver’s championship record and end a 17-year constructor’s title drought.
You really need to turn to other sports to find a free-agent signing that rivals Hamilton’s switch to Ferrari. Even there, it’s hard to find a true like-for-like move. Barry Bonds hadn’t ascended to greatness (and wasn’t particularly well-liked) when he left the Pittsburgh Pirates to sign with the San Francisco Giants before the 1993 season. Tom Brady was already the undisputed best quarterback of all time when he said goodbye to the New England Patriots and linked up with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020, but the latter franchise’s history was anything but sterling. The closest move is LeBron James’s decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers a second time and sign with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018, a transaction that gave the player his fourth ring and the franchise its 18th championship.
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Why It Was Time for Hamilton to Leave Mercedes
Image Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images There are some naysayers out there still, but to almost everyone else Hamilton is the greatest F1 driver of all time. He may be tied with Michael Schumacher for the most driver’s championships at seven, but he owns every other record that matters, including that for wins (with 105), pole positions (104), and podium finishes (202), all of which were held by Schumacher before him.
An eighth driver’s title would make Hamilton’s case even more unimpeachable. So, why leave Mercedes-AMG Petronas, the team where he claimed six of his championships (more than any other driver has done with a single team) between 2013 and 2024? Because, since losing the 2021 crown on the last lap of the last race of the season, the team has struggled to build a car that can compete with Red Bull (or McLaren or Ferrari) on a week-to-week basis. It would seem that Hamilton has decided that he has a better chance of beating Verstappen if he’s racing in Ferrari’s trademark Rosso Scuderia.
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Why Ferrari Wanted Hamilton so Badly
Image Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images In the fall of 2023, shortly after agreeing to an extension with Mercedes, Hamilton revealed in an interview with the newspaper Blick that Ferrari had approached him about joining several times over the years, but that he “never felt ready to move to Italy.”
It’s easy to see why Ferrari was so dogged in its pursuit of Hamilton. In addition to everything cited in the previous section, all but the first two years of the British driver’s career coincided with the longest title drought in Ferrari history. The team has won 16 constructor’s championships, seven more than anyone else (Williams and McLaren are next with nine each), but none since 2008. What better way to put an end to 16 years of misery than with the dominant driver of that era?
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Will It Work?
Image Credit: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images As great as Hamilton may be, he’s coming off the worst three-year stretch of his career. Since 2021’s last-gasp disappointment, he’s won just two races and finished on the podium only eight times. In the past, that would have been a bad haul for a single season for the driver, let alone the combined total from three. His former Mercedes teammate, Russell, fared only marginally better during the same period, winning one more race, suggesting the problem may not have been who was sitting in the driver’s seat.
Hamilton won’t be alone, of course. His teammate will be Ferrari veteran Leclerc, who finished second in the driver’s standings in 2022 and third last season. Neither of them is Verstappen, nor 2024 runner-up Lando Norris, but they just might be the best one-two combo in the sport, especially if a change of scenery and machinery proves invigorating for Hamilton.
Despite Sunday’s 10th-place finish, there is still reason for optimism. Ferrari’s new SF-25 race car was one of the more competitive vehicles during pre-season training at the end of February. Hamilton turned in the second fastest lap of the three-day event (1:29.379 minutes), with teammate Leclerc less than a tenth of a second behind him (1:29.431).
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Don’t Forget About Sainz
Image Credit: Clive Rose/Getty Images F1 teams have only two seats for drivers, so Hamilton’s move came at the expense of Carlos Sainz. The Spaniard has been one of the top performers in the sport over the last few years—he was only the non-Red Bull driver to win a race in 2023—sometimes even out-dueling former teammate Leclerc. It’s not often that finishing fifth in the standings costs a driver their job, but it’s also not often that your team can replace you with the GOAT.
Making matters worse, there wasn’t a natural landing spot for Sainz. It would take until the summer to find out where he’d be racing in 2025. The answer: Williams, a team that finished ninth last year. Because of this, expectations for Sainz, despite all his clear talent, won’t come close to what they were when he was at Ferrari. Don’t tell that to the driver, though. In Bahrain last month, William’s new star posted the fastest lap time of pre-season testing. In second? The man who took his job, Hamilton.
