Lewis Hamilton switches from Team Mercedes to Team Ferrari for the Formula 1 2025 season

Dear motor racing fans

A while ago, there was news about Lewis Hamilton confirmed to switch from the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team to the Scuderia Ferrari Team for the Formula 1 2025 season, replacing Carlos Sainz Jr. and I'm curious to see how well he will perform along with his future teammate (Charles Leclerc), meanwhile what if Mick Schumacher returns to F1, I wonder how well he is going to perform, but currently, he is Team Mercedes' reserve driver and going to race for Team Alpine Elf Endurance in World Endurance Championship 2024 season.

What are your thoughts on this?
How Lewis Hamilton’s sensational move from Mercedes to Ferrari played out | Formula 1®

Worried... maybe, is the word i'd use.

Danny O'Dwyer likes to bring up the racial aspect of the crowd's behaviour towards Hamilton, but there's no denying that he's always had a frosty reception from Ferrari fans at Monza, even one time having "black cats thrown at him" (how?). It's hard to say if there's been any change in that respect because him being booed on the podium requires that he... be on the... podium, which is an ever decreasing sight these days.

Part of that is the Mercedes lack of performance, but there's also the suggestion that post covid he wasn't the same unstoppable force anymore, it's not unreasonable to suggest someone is getting slower after doing it for 17 years, so his move to the feisty fiery prancing horse feels a little late, the car has been getting faster but the reliability is still a shot in the dark at times, if he can't come out of the gates swinging in 2024 these are the people he has to answer to.

I don't see any evidence he's slowing down. Lewis' 2022 season wasn't great but he also had sacrificed his season to try to experiment with setups to get Merc's overly complicated car working well, which didn't end up happening. His 2023 season was exceptionally good. He was third in the standings in a car that looked incapable of winning and Hamilton basically carried Mercedes to second place in the Constructor's standings. Without losing a bunch of points to that disqualification that wasn't his fault, he would have been within sprinting distance of beating Perez, who was driving the statistically most dominant car in the history of F1, to second in the Driver's Championship. Hamilton also dumpstered George Russell and made him look extremely average last year.

That said, I'm still unsure of how this all will go. Hamilton is used to a team that is operationally top notch. Mercedes is an extremely organized team that has plans for basically every situation and never hesitates with strategy calls. Ferrari is essentially the opposite of that and I could see it becoming increasingly frustrating for Lewis if Ferrari keeps up their decade-long tendency to make garbage strategy calls and throw away good results. The rumours that Hamilton is bringing Pete Bonnington, his race engineer for the last decade, with him make a lot of sense. I'm sure he doesn't want the guy who Vettel and Sainz had as an engineer since on occasion both of them got so angry at the guy that they ended up doing their own race strategies (which, funnily enough, usually worked out well for them).

I'm also curious who will take Hamilton's seat at Mercedes. Sainz is supposedly going to Sauber/Audi after this year so he's probably not in the running. Alonso is obviously great but his age is up there and could catch up with him sooner rather than later. An actual realistic option is Alex Albon, which is wild to say given where his career was at a few years back. He's driving well enough now that I wouldn't even blink if they announced him. Other than that, we'd be getting into the territory of Mercedes buying out contracts, which is way harder to predict. Merc can certainly afford to buy out contracts given that they're not paying tens of millions a year for Hamilton now. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Hoping Fernando is getting that Mercedes seat

@rebel_scum: That would be the funniest outcome imaginable.

My concern is that Hamilton is falling for the same trap that Vettel and Alonso fell for of thinking, "but what if I won in a Ferrari?" and that it would go about as well. I doubt Mick is ever getting back into an F1 car, but I can see there being a straight swap of Hamilton for Sainz. Carlos is the most reliable journeyman in the sport, and he had his Best Of The Rest year with a Mercedes powertrain. Merc has a year of leeway to figure it out, so maybe they'll find a way to poach Lando.

If anything, the idea of Kimi and Alonso carrying on into their 40's probably gave him the motivation to carry on. I thought he'd be done by now but here we are. He's not slipping down the order from his own ability so he probably sees Ferrari as one last adventure.

I can't think of who would entirely fit the bill for the Mercedes seat. Russell probably sees himself as team leader but I have Sainz down as a genuinely smarter racer. He's a good bet if they want to grab some sneaky results. Then again, 2025 could have some wunderkind on the horizon. Or maybe get Piastri from McLaren. Sorry, Lando. I just think him and Russell in the same team offers no exciting contrast.

I've been seeing a lot of folks say Mercedes should buy Piastri's McLaren contract out. I actually agree with that. Oscar was very clearly a rookie last year but we already were starting to see some flashes of brilliance from him and on a few occasions he looked better than Lando already. He still has to come to grips with the tires better and become more consistent, but if he manages to fix those things he may become one of the best drivers on the grid. Mercedes need that if they want to win championships. Russell, especially last year, seemed to crack under pressure a lot and put in a lot of performances that have made him seem less like a championship-calibre driver than he used to. He threw away a probable win in Singapore and made several other rather costly errors. His qualifying hasn't been fantastic either generally, even factoring in the Merc's weaker performance.

I somehow doubt Zak Brown is interested in trading away Piastri after all of the work he went through to get him on board in the first place though. It would have to be a pretty big cheque for him to allow Piastri to leave.

@shindig: That's how i see it too, he has said before about dreaming of driving for Ferrari but depending on how the 2025 car turns out it could easily become a nightmare, it won't be long before Leclerc's hair turns grey from frustration if the car doesn't get better and the team don't start making better decisions during the races.

Something else i just thought about, Hamilton famously gets involved as much as he can with car development and getting familiar with the team, and with the Mercedes and previously the McLaren F1 teams being based in the UK that's been pretty natural though he lives in Monaco. I'm guessing Ferrari is still based in Maranello and Hamilton doesn't speak Italian, which is fine English speakers are often always around, but he might have trouble getting as involved as he has been before.

When i saw the news i assumed it was an immediate move but apparently he's signed for 2025 so he's still driving for Mercedes for another year, in an interview with Jensen Button about the move he ponders if the team will start holding back information from Lewis since he's going to be moving to a rival team, i'm sure most of the team are more professional than that and will be working hard regardless, but it is a bit awkward.

Yeah, this announcement seems awkward for the teams in the same way the 2020 announcement that Vettel wouldn't be getting a new contract at Ferrari was since he was still contracted to drive for that year. It did make for interesting watching though when the season actually started since Vettel was much less risk-averse and did a lot of bold things he previously wouldn't have done (most notably, going against team strategy several times. Each time it ended up benefiting him. It almost felt like he was making a point about how bad Ferrari's strategy team was. It also was reminiscent of when Kimi lost his contract with Ferrari then stopped following team orders and had much better results including a final win). Hopefully we see something like that from Hamilton now since he's no longer tied to Mercedes' future and is mostly just driving for himself now.

More concrete reporting has popped up that Hamilton may be taking his race engineer, Pete Bonnington, with him. Mercedes has already acknowledged that talks on this subject are probably going to happen soon.

Does this change Ferrari's fortunes? No. Ferrari's current Elkann guy running them has been bad at his job for five years. I think it is safe to say Ferrari will never win another driver's championship during my lifetime. Ultimately, FIA screwed over my interest in the coming season by basically giving it to Red Bull thanks to Newey being the greatest aero engineer in F1 in human history.

That said, the issue with people in the F1 community STILL not giving Hamilton his due for being the GOAT or at least near GOAT levels is and has been racially coded and bums me the fuck out.

Yeah John Elkann nepotisming his way into running Ferrari and then chasing out most of the people who seemed like they knew what was needed to fix the team has been a huge bummer to watch as a former Ferrari fan. He is extremely averse to making the types of changes needed to fix the team's many problems. Ferrari's strategy and race management has been a problem for the better part of a decade now yet somehow in the last few seasons has become even worse.

The team finally seemed on the upward trajectory at the start of 2018 but after the death of their previous leader, all of that progress stalled out and has in some ways regressed. They are now basically a midfield-calibre team that occasionally builds frontrunning cars. They could have a car almost at Red Bull levels of dominant and still somehow screw up enough operationally that it would make the championship close.

Vegas was the most Elkann shit imaginable and it was HILARIOUS! Ferrari fucking up and helping Max win a race he absolutely hated all weekend... you can't make this shit up.

And it's 2024 and this is STILL how I feel whenever I see Team Ferrari pit: