The major change Hamilton's Ferrari move could have on his F1 legacy

With a single stroke of a pen, Formula 1 just got tremendously more interesting. Lewis Hamilton signing for Ferrari: even now, a week on, it sounds so exotically strange, a tease of the excitement to come.

That is now going to be studded into the upcoming 2024 F1 campaign too. Every time Hamilton faces the media across his final year with Mercedes, the Ferrari theme will hang in the air. Whether he feels he can’t engage, as a mark of respect for the team where he will have raced for 12 seasons by the end of this year, remains to be seen.

Such questions will adapt if the risks heighten. If, for example, the Mercedes W15 turns out to be a clear step better than the Ferrari SF-24. Overall, though, the expectation now forever pressed into this 2025 exchange of silver and black for red will shine through.

It’s something that not even Mercedes team principal and CEO Toto Wolff could have contemplated at the beginning of January. But when Hamilton arrived at his boss’s Oxfordshire home last Wednesday, Wolff had already heard “rumours a couple of days earlier” that something was amiss. Hamilton had been at Mercedes’ Brackley factory the day before this regular off-season appointment for his W15 seat fitting. He would sample the car in Mercedes’ simulator the day after his impending departure was announced.

Over coffee with Wolff, Hamilton broke the news. At the same time, Marc Hynes, his long-time associate recently returned to working within the seven-time world champion’s camp, arrived in Brackley to deliver a formal letter outlining the situation to the Mercedes squad.

Hamilton had wanted to notify Wolff personally, plus avoid letting the development hang over his final season with Mercedes and potentially destabilise it further. There was no attempt to try to change Hamilton’s mind.

“That was basically it,” says Wolff. “Then we had a good conversation. This is where we are.”

Hamilton will embark on his final season with Mercedes this year before joining Ferrari in 2025 to replace Sainz

Photo by: Dom Romney / Motorsport Images

Mercedes and Ferrari worked together to arrange when the news would be announced the following day – Thursday 1 February. Suggestions that the 31 January date, when Hamilton delivered the news to Wolff, was down to a mooted cut-off point for the option covering the 2025 season in his final Mercedes contract are understood to be incorrect.

At 2pm last Thursday, with reporters already camped out at the roundabout entrance of the Mercedes campus, the team was gathered and informed of the situation by Wolff and technical director James Allison. Wolff chimed in via video, because he’d continued with a pre-arranged trip to Milan with some of Mercedes’ engineers to meet F1 tyre supplier Pirelli.

The first media reports that day had come via Spain – the nation of soon-to-be ex-Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz – with enquiries to the parties involved at the top level revealing that the situation was so much more than the speculative stories about Hamilton heading to Ferrari that surfaced last spring. It was, indeed, really on.

"I only know that we were very aligned when we went into the Christmas period. We’ve said that in public and in the team. You need to ask Lewis why he changed his mind" Toto Wolff

Five hours after the Brackley base meeting had begun, first came Mercedes’ official comment: that Hamilton was to depart, having made what he called in a team statement “one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make”. Ferrari followed with a characteristically terse statement outlining how it was “pleased to announce that Lewis Hamilton will be joining the team in 2025”. Five minutes later, Sainz released a typically classy statement vowing to “give my absolute best for the team and for the Tifosi all around the world” in what is to be his fourth and last Ferrari campaign.

So, how had the all-time longest relationship between any F1 team and driver, statistically F1’s most successful gladiator to boot, finally reached the end? This was, after all, just five months on from Hamilton signing the deal that seemed to tie him to Mercedes until F1’s next rules reset in 2026.

“I only know that we were very aligned when we went into the Christmas period,” says Wolff. This was just before the confirmation that he and Allison had agreed new contracts with the team, apparently with no prior indication that Mercedes’ main star was considering a departure: “We’ve said that in public and in the team. You need to ask Lewis why he changed his mind…”

Hamilton’s main words on the situation have so far only come via that Mercedes statement, plus the 416-word Instagram post he released last Saturday. But here it’s important to rewind to that Monza weekend last year, where it was announced that Hamilton and George Russell had signed their current Mercedes deals. This was revealed as a two-year contract for Hamilton, with Russell’s arrangement extended to the end of next year too. But it’s revealing that the 2025 season of Hamilton’s offer was signed only as an option.

Hamilton signed a two-year deal with Mercedes in 2023, but the second year was only an option

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The first element in considering this is how Mercedes agreed to the deal, in the knowledge that there was a risk that Hamilton could leave, because it had wanted to keep its options open for 2026 and beyond. A typically pragmatic Wolff said as much in his call with the F1 press corps last Friday, the Austrian explaining “we felt that a longer-term contract would limit our options going forward”.

PLUS: The painful decision that Hamilton’s Ferrari F1 move has helped Mercedes avoid

The reverse side of this is that Hamilton had apparently wanted a longer commitment. And when it arrived via a Ferrari offer – announced only as a “multi-year contract” in that short statement – he saw the chance to unite that reality with something more fleeting and emotional.

“How he framed it to me is perfectly understandable: that he needed a new challenge, that he was looking for a different environment and that it was maybe the last possibility to do something else,” says Wolff. “We’re big boys, we knew that by signing a short-term contract, it could be of benefit for both sides. We couldn’t commit for a longer period. And he’s taken the option to exit. We totally respect that you can change your mind. There’s different circumstances.

“Switching to Ferrari, maybe for the last gig in his career, maybe rolling the dice a bit. I can follow that decision. I think also maybe one of the considerations was the opportunity to sign a long-term contract with Ferrari and give it a really big go at the end of his career. We didn’t talk about whether the opportunity was better there or with us because I don’t think you can say.”

In his Instagram post, Hamilton has already opened up on his decision – particularly the pull of the Prancing Horse, which had its most recent period of sustained F1 success while he climbed the junior single-seater ladder as a teenager with McLaren.

Mercedes has made clear that its W15 launch next Wednesday will not feature any outside media scrutiny, so it may not be until the first press conferences of the Bahrain test, starting in a fortnight’s time, that Hamilton fields any of those questions about his Ferrari future.

One such should be whether there was anything more than a desire to secure a long-term F1 future that impacted his choice. This is for a driver who, back when he was racking up titles for Mercedes, was wondering whether he’d race past 40, a milestone he will reach when he joins Ferrari.

“I feel incredibly fortunate, after achieving things with Mercedes that I could only have dreamed of as a kid, that I now have the chance to fulfil another childhood dream,” his post states. “Driving in Ferrari red.

The world's media will have to wait for Hamilton's first press conference appearance in Bahrain to ask him about his impending switch

Photo by: Jake Grant / Motorsport Images

“I still remember the feeling of taking a leap of faith into the unknown when I first joined Mercedes in 2013. I know some people didn’t understand it at the time, but I was right to make the move then, and it’s the feeling I have again now. I’m excited to see what I can bring to this new opportunity and what we can do together.

“However, right now, I’m not thinking about 2025. My focus is on the upcoming season and getting back out on track with Mercedes. I am more driven than ever, I am fitter and more focused than ever, and I want to help Mercedes win once again. I am 100% committed to the job I need to do and determined to end my partnership with the team on a high.”

Wolff insists that Mercedes is now focused on putting “a car on the track that has more pace than last year’s car”, with its sights trained on Red Bull. Replacing Hamilton for 2025, Wolff says, is “not something I want to be rushed to”, although he admits that the timing of his charge’s decision “bit us a bit”, with the recent announcements that Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris had signed fresh deals with Ferrari and McLaren respectively coming within two days of each other late last month.

"Maybe one of the considerations was the opportunity to sign a long-term contract with Ferrari and give it a really big go at the end of his career. We didn’t talk about whether the opportunity was better there" Toto Wolff

There is already speculation that, following Wolff’s assertion that “maybe it’s a chance to do something bold”, he could be eyeing a rapid promotion for Mercedes junior Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

Of Russell, Wolff says: “George has the potential to be the next lead driver in the team. I couldn’t wish for a new team leader when Lewis leaves… We’ve such a solid foundation, such a quick and talented and intelligent guy in a car, that we just need to take the right choice for the second driver, the second seat.”

Although Mercedes is set to enter 2024 with its long-established “transparent and fair” approach to its current drivers, Wolff is open that, as the year goes on, the team will have to re-evaluate Hamilton’s access “in terms of technical information”. This is standard F1 team practice and, while Wolff has no “doubt in Lewis’s integrity”, it would be logical to expect Russell to play more of a role in developing the W15 towards the W16.

Soon enough, Hamilton’s full attention will be turned towards starting afresh with Ferrari. He’ll have to learn Italian – something that would play well with the Tifosi, who are surely set to give him a thumping welcome in any case – but he can at least quickly rekindle the relationship he previously shared with team principal Fred Vasseur. This covers the 2005 Formula 3 Euro Series campaign, in which Hamilton triumphed for Vasseur’s ASM squad, before doing the same in GP2 a year later with another Vasseur outfit, ART Grand Prix, ahead of his famous F1 debut.

Vasseur is still building Ferrari back up, which is what Hamilton is referring to when he evokes the doubters of his 2013 Mercedes move. That adds to the jeopardy of this switch, but Hamilton’s own F1 history shows how big the potential upsides are in the surely massively lucrative deal he has now made – his current arrangement at Mercedes is reportedly worth £50million a year. His new terms have been signed off by Ferrari chairman and Hamilton acquaintance John Elkann.

Hamilton has plenty of history with Vasseur, who ran him to F3 Euro Series and GP2 titles before he arrived in F1

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

But there’s also the possibility of something much bigger being achieved in his move to Ferrari, F1’s most storied squad. Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher are the only two F1 champions to have joined the team and tasted more title success. Alain Prost, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel are the failures, while Ayrton Senna never got a chance to try what a driver who idolised him will soon be attempting.

PLUS: The contrasting fortunes of F1's big-name moves to Ferrari

Hamilton, like Schumacher, has already achieved championship glory with two teams, and so is a key factor in any assessment of the greatest F1 drivers of all time. They are tied on a total of seven titles, although there remains the possibility that Hamilton arrives at Ferrari as an eight-time world champion, the current supremacy of Red Bull and Max Verstappen notwithstanding.

If Hamilton’s Ferrari dream move does contain the ultimate F1 success, he’d not only join an ultra-exclusive club, but carve his own huge piece of unique history too.

Will Hamilton be vindicated in his Ferrari switch by claiming an elusive eighth title?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images