Lewis Hamilton has one more season at Mercedes before he saddles up for the Prancing Horse, but how will his impending departure to Ferrari impact 2024?
FILIP CLEEREN
Mercedes
The dust from Lewis Hamilton’s shock move from Mercedes to Ferrari for 2025 had barely had time to settle by the time Formula 1 testing got under way in Bahrain. The seven-time world champion and the two teams all appeared keen to get this winter’s headline story out of the way before the start of the season, to avoid speculation spilling out into the coming weeks and months and becoming an ever-larger distraction.
But while there is now clarity over the 2025 Ferrari line-up and Hamilton’s future – which we thought we already had, given he signed a two-year Mercedes deal last summer – the subject of speculation will inevitably shift to the identity of Hamilton’s successor and to how the intra-team dynamic within Mercedes will change in 2024.
It is very rare for F1 to be experiencing a situation where two high-profile stars such as Hamilton and Carlos Sainz know they will be leaving their current teams before a wheel even turned in the Bahraini desert. Hamilton’s stint with Mercedes is the longest one driver has ever had with a single team in F1: over an 11-year stint, he has notched up 222 starts, claimed 82 wins and won six drivers’ championships. With the pride and the relationships he has built in Brackley, there seems little doubt that he will not change one iota of his laser-focused approach heading into 2024.
“I feel the most motivated and focused I’ve ever been,” the 39-year-old Hamilton said at the launch of the W15. “Every year you come back, you’re like ‘I’m fitter than ever’, and all these other things. I genuinely feel I put more work and more time and more focus into preparation this year. I never thought that at this point in my life I would have hunger like I do right now. And to finish on a high with the team, it will be a dream. We’ve gone through a whole heap together, so [it would] be the greatest honour to be able to help them get back to the top.”
Getting Mercedes back to the top of the pyramid in the short term is perhaps fanciful given Red Bull’s crushing domination in the current rules cycle, with team principal Toto Wolff admitting that the team has a “mountain to climb” in an industry where silver bullets don’t exist. Following two difficult years, which may have helped prompt Hamilton’s Ferrari move, Mercedes has finally embarked on a
