One of Formula 1’s most celebrated drivers of all-time is joining its most feted and romantic team. Time to unravel how this biggest of ‘silly season’ shocks came to fruition
ALEX KALINAUCKAS PHOTOGRAPHY
HAMILTON TO FERRARI
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.”
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 o
