Wolff wrapped Hamilton in “cotton wool” – Lewis Hamilton is now a Formula One driver for the most historic of the teams, Ferrari. The seven times world champion was clearly miffed with the paltry one year deal offered by the Silver Arrows and within weeks had put pen to paper with the Scuderia for a multi-year deal which runs currently to the end of 2026.

Of course as Daniel Ricciardo can testify to, no deal is guaranteed if a driver isn’t delivering the goods, yet things would need to go particularly wrong for Hamilton for him to be dismissed from Maranello.

Lewis tenure with Mercedes has been twelve long and predominantly profitable years as he became the first ever F1 competitor to win six championships with a single team. Yet since his calamitous last lap of the season efforts in Abu Dhabi back in 2021, Hamilton has looked a shadow of his former self clocking up his worst season last year since joining the sport back in 2007.

 

 

 

Hamilton Mercedes move ‘a gamble’

Hamilton finished in just P7 in the driver standings in 2024 and while his points tally was just 22 points shy of his team mate that does not reflect the gulf between the two. The points differential is more than double when taking the Spa-Francorchamps debacle into account, where Russell won the race but was disqualified because the team sent his car out underweight. This alone was a 32 point swing in Hamilton’s favour.

Lewis broke his 56 race winless drought at Silverstone last season, yet another lap more around the Northamptonshire circuit and the superior strategy from Red Bull would have seen Verstappen victorious at the 2024 British Grand Prix.

The seven times world champion was prised from his McLaren home back in 2013, by a combination of the persuasive powers of Ross Brawn and Niki Lauda. Having been nurtured by Ron Dennis from the age of twelve, many paddock observers believed the switch may not suit Hamilton who was comfortable in his role as lead driver for the historic British racing marque.

Yet the $1bn invested in research and development by Mercedes for the all new V6 Turbo hybrid powertrain proved to be unstoppable with Lewis behind the wheel, although his team mate Nico Rosberg proved to be a harder nut to crack than many believed would be the case.

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The Rosberg/Hamilton feud sprouts

Rosberg had comprehensive beaten his previous team mate Michael Schumacher who had returned from retirement when Mercedes bought the Brawn GP in 2010. In all three seasons together as Mercedes’ drivers, Rosberg finished ahead of Schumacher in the drivers’ championship and in 2010 and 2012, he came close to scoring double the number of points of his F1 record breaking team-mate.

Just eighteen points separated the pair in their first year together in 2013 and following pre-season testing in Jerez in 2014, Mercedes were widely considered to have the best F1 package to beat the rest of the field across the course of the campaign. Yet all eyes were on Rosberg and Hamilton to see how the once childhood friends would cope with the pressure of being favourites to win world titles.

At the season opener in Australia, Hamilton was forced to retire due to mechanical failure leaving Nico Rosberg to collect the winners trophy. The first signs of tension between the pair appear next time out in Bahrain was the pair dulled late in the race for the victory.

A late safety car appeared to have favoured Rosberg who was now on the faster tyre, yet Hamilton completed one of his best defensive drives of his career, to hand on and claim the victory, but signs of trouble were already sprouting.

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Drivers defy Mercedes instructions

It emerged following the chequered flag that Rosberg had used high power engine modes banned by Mercedes in his efforts to pass his team mate. Hamilton now with two wins from three was cock-a-hoop but chose to make the point that analysis of his previous drive in Malaysia had been turned into a cheat sheet for his team mate.

“Someone in the team did a huge study on my pace in Malaysia. And since I arrived in Bahrain, Nico had a big document of all the places I was quick and used that to his advantage. So I will do the same for the next round in China and hope I can capitalise,” claimed Hamilton.

Of course the three year long rivalry between Hamilton and Rosberg is well recorded in the history books together with Toto Wolff’s ongoing battle to keep his waring drivers from going together on track.

At the subsequent Spanish Grand Prix, it emerged Hamilton used the same banned engine mode as Rosberg had done, to defend from his team mate and take victory in Barcelona. But things turned ultimately for the worse in Monaco, where on their final Q3 runs, Rosberg ran wide at Mirabeau bringing out the yellow flag which forced Hamilton to abort his final run.

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Wolff deflects attention from Hamilton

Despite the stewards clearing Rosberg of any wrong doing, this clearly irked Lewis who started and finished the race in second place. When asked if he thought Rosberg had crashed on purpose, replied “Potentially. I should have known that was going to happen”.Toto Wolff did his best to dispel the conspiracy theory raised in the paddock describing it as “Bulls**t.

Hamilton declared in the media pen post race that he and Rosberg were no longer friends and so the compendium which Toto Wolff was to build concerning the driving standards of Hamilton and Rosberg was opened.

Mercedes became the perfect environment for Hamilton to flourish as team boss Toto Wolff gave the British driver almost complete freedom to do as he pleased away from the circuit. The controlled environment Wolff built for his star driver in fact mirrored some of there culture that Lewis’ experienced at McLaren.

Ferrari will be a while different ball game for the seven ties world champion, Who reportedly met his Maranello engineers for the first time today. The team has been created around Ferrari protege Charles Leclerc since the Monegasque joined back in 2019. Now Stephen Heublein reports for Motorsport-Magazin one key reason why Lewis may struggle having joined F1’s most iconic team.

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Lewis wrapped in “cotton wool”

Ferrari are the closes thing F1 has to a national team. The Italian media pen hundreds of column inches about issues surrounding Ferrari on a weekly basis. A single strategy error sees the race crew slammed for incompetence and repeated driver errors are met with little less scorn.

Heublein argues that at Mercedes, Hamilton delivered superb results while being able to undertake other activities off the track, but there is extra pressure at Ferrari. “At Mercedes, we often discussed it with Niki Lauda and Toto Wolff, who built up this cotton ball around him, and he could do what he wanted to [go from] his fashion shows to arrive in Singapore suddenly and blow everyone away with a qualifying lap if the car was good enough.

“At Ferrari it’s just enough if you have one weekend that doesn’t go well or make a mistake somewhere or you have a crash and all hell breaks loose in the Italian press. Let’s see how Lewis reacts to it and how the mature Lewis Hamilton can deal with it,” he concludes.

Hamilton will have to raise his game if he is to stand chance against Charles Leclerc who with his 26 pole positions in F1 ios masterful at delivering the single qualifying lap. In 2024 Lewis failed to claim a single pole position over the course of the season and made a front row start just once in thirty outings.

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Russell claims he’s now better than Hamilton

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,” as the author Charles Dickens once penned. Yet this opening from ‘a Tale of two cities’ cold well be the epitaph on Lewis Hamilton’s F1 career with Mercedes.

Hamilton claimed six world titles with Mercedes, more than any other driver with a single team in F1 history yet his tenure with the Brackley based F1 team was often epitomised as lurching from one extreme to another.

Lewis battled in the extreme for three years alongside Nico Rosberg who pushed him to the wire for the drivers’ title race in 2014 before beating Hamilton to become champion in 2016. Rosberg’s surprise retirement announcement that year saw the more malleable Valtteri Bottas brought in to partner Hamilton, and all was well until in 2021 the upstart Max Verstappen in a Red Bull came a calling… READ MORE