Ferrari’s New F1 Formula: The Prancing Horse Meets the GOAT
Lewis Hamilton driving the famous red car combines two of the most storied names in the sport. Can it deliver the 40-year-old driver one final championship?
By Joshua Robinson
March 13, 2025 11:00 am ET
Even after everything he had achieved in Formula One—the seven world championships, the century of race wins, and his status as the GOAT—there was one racing dream that Lewis Hamilton was about ready to give up on.
With his 40th birthday fast approaching, he figured that it might just be too late to drive for Ferrari.
Then, a couple of winters ago, the call came out of nowhere. Would the most successful F1 driver of all time consider joining the sport’s most storied team?
It was a chance Hamilton couldn’t pass up. More than a year later, a rejuvenated Hamilton is finally set to make his Ferrari debut at this weekend’s season opener in Australia. And every step he takes in his new job seems to turn back the clock on a career that has spanned nearly two decades.
“I almost feel like I’ve got a rookie here,” Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur says. “He has that enthusiasm of someone discovering F1 for the time.”
His excitement since he first toured the team’s factory at Maranello has been palpable, if only because Hamilton’s Italian renaissance once seemed so far-fetched. The driver who moonlights as a global fashion icon has worn all manner of outrageous outfits to F1 circuits—from head-to-toe Barbie pink to neon zebra print—but no one ever expected him to come to work in the famous red overalls.
Hamilton spent over a decade at Mercedes, where he won six world championships. Plus, he’d just signed a two-year contract to remain with the team despite its sputtering form. Hamilton was a company man. The only wrinkle was that his new deal came with an opt-out after the 2024 season. That was all Ferrari needed to make a bold, spectacularly expensive gamble.
“He’d hoped to drive for Ferrari one day for the past 20 years—he had that in him,” Vasseur says. “And I could see from my end that it wasn’t going great at Mercedes. So the planets were aligned.
More than a simple driver transfer, Ferrari and Hamilton both knew that the switch represented a merger between two of the biggest brands in the sport. On one side was the only team that has participated in every single Formula One season since the series began in 1950. On the other was a slick ambassador who moved easily from grease-stained garage to Paris catwalk—and happened to be among the greatest racers ever to squeeze into a cockpit.
What these two had in common is that both were a little further removed from their peaks than they’d like. Ferrari’s last constructors’ championship came in 2008, while it was plain to see that Hamilton was feeling jaded at Mercedes.
“Is it me, or is it the car?” he wondered aloud in 2023. “Do you still have it? Has it gone?”
Hamilton hadn’t won a world title since 2020 and nearly quit the sport altogether when he lost the 2021 championship to Max Verstappen in controversial circumstances on the final lap of the final race of the season. At one point, he went three years without a single race victory until he snapped the streak last summer at Silverstone. With younger, seemingly hungrier drivers now duking it out at the front of the grid, it was fair to wonder whether Hamilton was finished.
“Some of the comments that have come out over my career—it’s not just been this past 12 months or so—I just use that as fuel,” the 40-year-old said this month.
Living out his boyhood dream helps, too. Though his Italian remains limited, Hamilton has spent the past few months inhaling Ferrari lore like a bowl of spaghetti. He has visited Enzo Ferrari’s house and driven the iconic test track at Fiorano. He tells anyone who will listen that his all-time favorite road car is the F40. Every time he’s been to Maranello, he feels the weight of history.
“If you’re on the pit wall, you’re giving 100% whether your car is blue, white, green, or red,” Vasseur said. “Where Ferrari is different is when you get back to the factory and you feel the passion of the people. It’s like nowhere else… This isn’t a racing team, it’s a national team.”
Hamilton’s mission now is to bring glory back to the Scuderia alongside his teammate Charles Leclerc, of Monaco, before wholesale regulation changes shuffle the pack in 2026—though he understands that heartbreak remains a real possibility. The team, which finished second last year behind McLaren, has had plenty of near misses and own goals during one of the longest dry spells since Enzo Ferrari first slapped a prancing horse on a shiny red car.
Hamilton driving the Scuderia Ferrari SF-25 on track during F1 Testing in Bahrain.
If Hamilton does break the hoodoo, he would become the first man ever to win eight F1 world titles, surpassing Ferrari legend Michael Schumacher. He would also become the oldest champion in nearly 70 years. But Vasseur, who first worked with Hamilton in a development series in 2005, believes that he’s as sharp as he’s ever been.
“He’s one of the only drivers who really knows how to compartmentalize his life,” Vasseur says. “He can spend one day doing marketing, the next day doing fashion, and the third discussing his front-left tire with an engineer.”
How quickly Hamilton can turn that into podium finishes will become clear in the coming months. Ferrari is betting it won’t take that long for him to adapt. This isn’t the first time Hamilton has wrenched the wheel into a surprising turn. Back in 2013, he stunned the sport by leaving McLaren, the team he had first joined as a teenager, in order to join a struggling outfit called Mercedes.
“Everyone thought the move was strange,” Vasseur said. “It was hard for him to leave, but he did it for the right reasons. He’s always looked ahead.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
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