by Enzo Ferrari liked his English drivers. In 1958 Mike Hawthorn, tied with a bow, became the team’s third world champion. John Surtees won the title in 1964, ending a period of internal turmoil. When Ferrari died in 1988, aged 90, he had just signed up Nigel Mansell for the following season. I liked Mansell’s aggression, his competitive spirit. He would certainly appreciate Lewis Hamilton, too.
As Hamilton revealed while still reeling from Thursday’s sudden announcement that he will join Scuderia Ferrari in 2025, he already knows about driving cars from Maranello. He has two of them in his garage in California. Next year will take the relationship a step further, into the dream world of every young racing driver.
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The slogans are mixed. The seven-time world champion is joining a team that can achieve 243 victories from 1,076 grands prix. Given his personal tally of 103 wins from 332 starts, also a record, Hamilton is unlikely to be overwhelmed by the statistics.
But Ferrari’s long history is riddled with long periods and operatic worries that love or money couldn’t buy victory, such as the dry spells they endured in the late 60s and 70s and all the way through the 80s and 90s. Another such drought is now affecting them, with no drivers’ champion since 2007 and no constructors’ title since 2008.
Hamilton is currently on a downward spiral of his own. After winning at least one race every year between 2007, his first season, and 2021, he has now gone two years without a win, a bitter streak to unfairly scuttle his chances of an eighth title as the 2021 season reaches its climax. Abu Dhabi.
At 39, with perhaps only two or three years left at the top, he seems to have concluded that the cars currently supplied by his team are unlikely to match the performance that is currently unmanageable of Red Bull Max Verstappen before a new set of technical regulations come into force in 2026.
He will miss the close relationship developed with Mercedes over the years. Team principal Toto Wolff is the man who agreed to paint the cars, historically known as Silver Arrows, black to pay tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement – a decision unthinkable at Ferrari, where red is sacred, although the exact shade was there. it was once changed to match sponsor Marlboro cigarettes. He will miss Mercedes’ technical director, James Allison, and his race engineer, Pete Bonnington.
But the presence of Fred Vasseur, who came to Ferrari as team principal a year ago, could decide for the worse. They won Formula 3 and GP2 titles with teams run by Vasseur and Hamilton was a member of McLaren’s driver development programme. Now Vasseur will be hoping to emulate the impact of Jean Todt, the only other Frenchman to run the team, who arrived in 1995, lured Michael Schumacher to Maranello, and oversaw a string of titles that restored the Scuderia where they are always sure. belongs
Hamilton proved the doubters wrong when he switched from the dominant McLaren team to the underperforming Mercedes outfit in 2013. Vasseur has probably convinced him that Ferrari has the technical firepower now to match Red Bull, and there will be no more strategic errors. he has often spoiled the promise of recent seasons.
He will be racing alongside the talented Charles Leclerc, 13 years his junior, knowing that while Enzo Ferrari has always encouraged internal competition, the team has worked effectively in the periods when Niki Lauda’s No1 status was clear at first and then Schumacher. Hamilton will have to fight for that priority against an entrenched and indebted teammate at Maranello.
But even in trying times the red cars remain unique, the only team to have participated in every world championship since the first series in 1950. They were a new team then, but within a year they had their first grand prix victory of them and were soon celebrating the victories of Alberto Ascari, the first of the nine drivers to win the world title.
Those nine champions represented eight different nationalities: Italian, Argentinian, American, Austrian, South African, German, Finnish and the two Englishmen. Hawthorn became Britain’s first world champion at the wheel of a Ferrari named after Dino, Enzo’s beloved first son, who had died two years earlier of muscular dystrophy, aged 24. Peter Collins, Hawthorn’s friend and colleague, with Dino during his illness. The red cars of the two Englishmen were neck and neck in the championship when Collins was killed at the Nürburgring.
A year after Hawthorn’s title, another Englishman, Tony Brooks, came a long way from the championship for Ferrari. In 1962 Stirling Moss, the greatest English racer of his generation, was about to race Ferrari in F1 when an accident ended his career. Two years later Surtees restored the team’s joy, but other Englishmen – Cliff Allison, Mike Parkes, Jonathan Williams and Derek Bell – made less of an impression when they briefly ran for the team in the 60s.
The company was still mourning the death of Enzo when Mansell raised hopes when he won the first race of the 1989 season. He left after two years, a victim of internal politics but with a nickname – Il Leon – reflecting the qualities that have won him a place in the hearts of Italian fans.
Hamilton will want to leave with more than a nickname. Of the five drivers who, like him, were already world champions when they joined Ferrari, two – Juan Manuel Fangio and Schumacher – went on to win more titles with the team. The other three – Alain Prost, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel – were hoping for more glory in a very public and sometimes humiliating way. As Hamilton will discover, the Ferrari driver exists in a world where there are no halves.
