What to expect from Hamilton at Ferrari

During the 2023 summer break, Formula 1 was still drying out from a soaking Spa weekend, and more crushing dominance from Red Bull was expected when the championship reconvened. Now, it’s basking in a sunny Belgian send-off, with Lewis Hamilton ultimately its most recent race winner.

His sensational win at Silverstone in July was an important part of what has made the 2024 campaign F1’s most varied in 12 years in terms of different victors. Now that it’s clear how interesting this season has been compared to last, let’s recall how Hamilton himself started this year of compelling narrative twists.

His decision to switch from Mercedes to Ferrari for 2025 remains the biggest news of the year. It has topped even Adrian Newey electing to leave Red Bull and that team’s ugly management war, plus feel-good stories such as Carlos Sainz winning in Melbourne two weeks after his appendicitis surgery, or Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri taking their first grand prix wins for McLaren.

In terms of the constructors’ championship, Hamilton’s Mercedes squad has fallen two positions from this time last year: from second following Spa 2023 to fourth now in 2024. But what is more telling about the current situations for both his current home and soon-to-be new one at Ferrari is how Hamilton was asked twice last month at Silverstone about possible regrets over his winter decision.

His answers differed on the two days. “Yes” was the one-word response to whether he would still have opted to leave Mercedes if, at the end of another disappointing campaign in 2023, he’d had the car he has now. That answer came just after Hamilton had been beaten in qualifying by current team-mate George Russell.

After winning the next day, and with slightly more careful phrasing regarding Hamilton’s record British GP success with a local squad he knows so well wrapped up in the question, Hamilton was far more effusive to essentially the same enquiry. “No,” he began. “I think when we started the season and we had a car where we weren’t going anywhere near Red Bull… anywhere near looking like we would get a win through the year, that for me felt like it would be kind of bittersweet at the end of the season, where you’ve not had something like today.

“And the fact that we’ve really all come together, everyone’s done such a great job to get the car into a place where we’re feeling much more comfortable. So, not leaving on a low, but leaving on a high, which has been our goal. There’s still a long way to go; the car is by no means the quickest car on the grid right now. I think we are super-close, and I think hopefully with a couple of [developments], with the next upgrade perhaps, we will be in an even stronger position to really, really be fighting at the front more consistently.”

With an emotional British GP win to look back on, Hamilton doesn't think his final year at Mercedes will feel bittersweet

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Given he’s still a Mercedes driver, Hamilton’s comments are always going to centre on his current squad. There’s not much more to do other than repeatedly trot out his “childhood dream” of “driving in Ferrari red” until he arrives at Maranello.

But Hamilton/Ferrari is such a potent combination of F1 success. Between them, they’ve won 23 world titles – 38 if you add in all the drivers’ crowns collected in scarlet so far. And when you consider how the current F1 spread of success suggests the 2025 campaign could be the most open for years, with a year-long title battle possible for the first time since Hamilton and Max Verstappen scrapped so thrillingly in 2021, questions about what could be possible for this merger next year only mount. Handily, the other side can answer them.

Ferrari’s position is among the biggest current stories in F1. This is always the case to a certain extent, given the team’s illustrious heritage, but the state of its SF-24 car is one of the reasons why Hamilton was being asked about regrets back at Silverstone.

Leclerc has revealed that he spent time in the races leading up to Spa experimenting with set-ups early in race weekends to try to assist Ferrari in eliminating its bouncing. That’s intriguing, considering how Hamilton was doing the same around Mercedes’ early ground-effect era struggles with porpoising

How Ferrari recovers from a tricky period will be something to closely watch until the end of the year but, given there’s little point trying a design revolution next season with the 2026 rule changes upcoming, the results of the SF-24 to the end of this year could be a major pointer for 2025.

PLUS: Seven themes to watch for the rest of F1 2024

Ferrari’s current problem goes back to its floor update introduced at June’s Spanish GP as part of a wider package of parts. There, the car that had previously been so compliant and predictable, to the point that Charles Leclerc and Sainz could finally make big gains on in-race tyre wear, and numerous strategy headaches were solved in consequence, was suddenly robbing its drivers of confidence.

The problem was the car – twice a winner in 2024, let’s not forget – bouncing through high-speed turns. This is exactly the territory where drivers need to trust their machines the most or be forced to back off and lose lap time. And exactly the scenario that had plagued the Mercedes machines for so much of the current era. But if Hamilton is alarmed by this, he’s keeping it under wraps.

Hamilton will have been keeping a close eye on Ferrari's recent car troubles

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

Either way, Ferrari has moved to address the issue. After testing its previous floor against the new one in practice at Silverstone, it tweaked the update ahead of the Hungarian GP. Next time out at Spa, it was in podium contention thanks to Leclerc’s strong qualifying.

Even if Leclerc felt “we were the fourth fastest car” on race day in Belgium, Ferrari’s overall showing was still far from the “undriveable” prediction Sainz had made for such high-speed tracks a few weeks earlier.

“In terms of development, we went through a process where we came to understand the hard limits of these aspects of car behaviour really well,” Leclerc told Autosport before F1 headed off to its summer break. “And it’s going to be super-important to respect that for the future, in order to have a car that is easier to understand, and especially to anticipate and predict for us drivers when [we are out on the circuit].

“That’s the main area, because then we have a car that is predictable, like we’ve had for the past year. Since Monza [2023], we saw that we are a team that can make great progress. However, the thing that stopped us making that progress is probably the return of this bouncing that we did not quite expect, but we have understood. I’m confident that now we’ll be back on our path of improving it.

“The bouncing is what created the inconsistencies we have seen in the last few races and made us struggle a bit more than before. But again, I’m sure that this phase helped us to understand a few things.”

But even if Ferrari’s car performance trajectory turns around, it cannot get back the months of development time on the SF-24 lost by that Barcelona floor backfiring. In the cost cap era, every update working as expected is more critical than ever.

This is why it’s so interesting to hear Verstappen discuss Red Bull’s Hungary upgrade not delivering as much of a gain as he had yearned for, or Andrea Stella explain that his McLaren squad – clear of both Mercedes and Ferrari these days – has carefully held back on unleashing more developments since Miami in May after witnessing things go wrong for other teams, including Ferrari’s floor flummox.

PLUS: Has McLaren kept an ace up its sleeve in fight against Red Bull and Mercedes?

Leclerc has also been testing different set-ups to find a cure for Ferrari's bouncing

Photo by: Erik Junius

Leclerc has revealed that he spent time in the races leading up to Spa experimenting with set-ups early in race weekends to try to assist Ferrari in eliminating its bouncing. That’s intriguing, considering how Hamilton was doing the same around Mercedes’ early ground-effect era struggles with porpoising.

“I went very aggressive in four races with set-up, especially, trying to find solutions for that,” Leclerc explains. “And I think I’ve been paying a heavy price for doing those aggressive set-up changes in order to find a solution.

“You pay the price sometimes. That means that when I got to qualifying, most of the time, it was probably the first time I [had driven] the car that I had in qualifying [in terms of a specific set-up]. And then you make more mistakes, you don’t optimise the car as much as a driver, and you pay the price.

"When you have a seven-time world champion joining the team, it’s always good news" Charles Leclerc

“I remember last year we had two races like that, and it started at Zandvoort where we decided, ‘OK, maybe Zandvoort is not going to be the race for us, but we want to learn as much as possible in order to get better after that.’ And I’m sure that this is the same process we have gone through in the last three or four races [before Spa].

“However, the negative point about it is that we’ve lost three or four races instead of two last year. But I believe that that gave us a much deeper understanding of what was happening, and I’m confident to say that we’ve learned a lot.”

While such a process might be deja vu for Hamilton, Ferrari will gain considerably from his 350+ races experience in F1 when he joins – on that specific issue, but also more generally. This is something Leclerc recognises when he says, “When you have a seven-time world champion joining the team, it’s always good news.”

Hamilton and Leclerc will make for a potent combination at Ferrari next year

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“First, because it’s super-interesting and super-motivating for me,” he adds. “Super-interesting because I can learn from one of the best-ever F1 drivers. And second, super-motivating because I’m super-motivated to show what I’m capable of doing against Lewis in the same car. So, for these reasons, I’m really looking forward to it.”

Indeed, Ferrari’s fluctuating progress on car performance is just one topic among many that arose following Hamilton’s decision to make another potentially career-defining F1 team move. Many are excited by the prospect of seeing Hamilton alongside Leclerc at Ferrari. Finally, the championship will see Leclerc up against a great who can still deliver close to his peak, as Sebastian Vettel ultimately could not. F1 will also understand exactly how far from such exceptional heights the seven-time world champion really is.

Hamilton’s Silverstone drive showed his enduring class – especially in how he kept his soft tyres alive first ahead of Norris, then with a charging Verstappen bearing down late on, and all the mental weight of those winless wilderness years since 2021 pressing down upon him in front of his home crowd.

That tyre management magic is something McLaren cited as it licked its wounds from Norris’s defeat that day. It’s something that Ferrari stands to gain from with Hamilton’s arrival. Because for all of Leclerc’s qualifying heroics, he’s still not proved he can decisively kick on in this area, or shoulder the burden of a full title tilt. Without a crown, there’s materially more risk in him coming off worse in the thrilling story between these two just around the corner.

With Hamilton leaving Mercedes, the conspiracy theories that have abounded since he rather clumsily suggested in Monaco that Russell was getting preferential treatment from Mercedes will end. That case was specifically regarding the new front wing Hamilton had rejected running there due to the risk of damaging it in qualifying and so having to start from the pitlane, due to the parc ferme specification change rule.

Mercedes insiders are adamant that there was never any merit behind such suggestions, precisely because by harming the chances of one car they’d imperil the rewards that come with higher constructors’ places for themselves.

The favourite to take Hamilton’s seat

When Sainz signed for Williams, it said plenty about lots of Formula 1 teams. Red Bull’s bizarre driver line-up strategy; the alarming state of Audi’s nascent project; all the risk around Alpine. But it also showed that the path to Mercedes in a straight swap with Hamilton for 2025 is closed. The Silver Arrows squad wants to promote another of its juniors.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli has had considerable attention in 2024. Given his ultra-successful junior career and fast-tracking to Formula 2, this is understandable. What made things very different was Mercedes boss Toto Wolff revealing Hamilton’s current contract had a split clause to give Merc the chance to revisit its F1 line-up should Antonelli continue to impress. Then there was the arrival of the new F2 Dallara and Antonelli’s Prema Racing squad surprisingly struggling, giving him a long wait for a breakthrough result.

That arrived at Silverstone in July, before he put in an even more impressive win in the Hungary feature race. He’s also completed three F1 tests – including outings at Imola, Silverstone and Spa – in the 2022 Merc.

Wolff’s mind was set: impressing in these meant more than shining among the vagaries that come (frustratingly for some) in the generally single-make junior pyramid. Confirming his thinking is how Mercedes has now started to allow Antonelli to appear in the media beyond official F2 press conferences – think his F1 TV garage shots or celebrating after the team’s recent grand prix victories. Now, he’s spoken to our Motorsport.com Italy colleague, Roberto Chinchero. It’s all part of Mercedes’ plan to train him for what (for now) is a theoretical promotion to the big time in 2025. The team is waiting to announce its decision, simply because it can and because it can also change its mind if a certain triple world champion becomes available after all.