Lewis Hamilton's Trip to Italy

If one can be said to feel sorry for an F1 team, I feel sorry for Mercedes. Lewis Hamilton is starting the 2025 F1 campaign with Ferrari after enjoying one of the greatest runs in the sport's history with the Silver Arrows team. Six drivers and seven constructors championships. 84 race wins, the equivalent of four complete F1 seasons spent on the top step of the podium wearing a Mercedes uniform. And now, for his F1 career's final act, he's wearing red.

It feels like only Ferrari could’ve drawn Hamilton away from a team with which he had become synonymous; that no matter what Mercedes meant to Hamilton, no matter what they’ve accomplished together, Mercedes is still not Ferrari. If you’re one of the great F1 drivers and you have the chance to go to be a Ferrari driver, you go. Thirty-five years after his death, the Commendatore still has the power to summon drivers to Maranello.

There’s a clip that made the rounds, shorty after Hamilton's move was announced, of Sebastian Vettel talking about the Catholic nature of the Ferrari brand, back in his days with the team, specifically calling out people who work for Mercedes as being crypto-Ferrari fans. 

Except brand feels like the wrong word. People who talk about the “brand” are usually in the business of relating to things as commodities, and they use the word to transform emotion and identity into a quantifiable asset, the same way “content” is used to reduce art and storytelling to an interchangeable slurry meant to fill people’s time. Ferrari is a triumph of branding because the company has never felt like it’s calculating enough to think like that. It inefficiently produces high-maintenance sports cars that look and sound so beautiful that reason and practicality are silent in the face of them. People who are convinced that everyone who drives a Audi or McLaren is a rich asshole will at the same time buy a Ferrari shirt or keychain because the allure of the dream is stronger than the reality that only plutocrats can truly live it.

The team occupies such a special place in Formula 1 that it used to receive tens of millions of dollars annually from F1, just because of the name. Whenever tensions with the sport’s governing bodies boil over, Ferrari threatens to quit, which is taken very seriously because it is, or was, the one team that is basically synonymous with the sport itself.

Whether Ferrari is that good a racing team doesn’t matter. Too much can be made at times of Ferrari mistakes, but you can’t deny that the team has struggled at times to interpret and react to the twists and turns of an F1 race. Where other teams might be angrily questioned by their drivers over the radio, Ferrari and its drivers would engage in discursive negotiations at 190 mph. 

Behind the sneers and disdain its detractors have for Ferrari during its down periods is something else though: expectation. It’s worse if Ferrari has a bad year or decade because, on some level, everybody expects this team to be great in a way they don’t expect of similarly storied teams like McLaren or Williams. Every team struggles, but Ferrari is treated as if every bad result reflects underlying moral failings that are disturbing the natural order.

After the mounting frustration and disenchantment that characterized Fernando Alonso’s and Sebastian Vettel’s periods with the team, it seemed like Ferrari’s spell should finally have been broken. Two era-defining talents had each gone there expecting to win a lot of races and at least a couple championships, and each had seen their fortunes wane while Red Bull and Mercedes became F1’s foremost teams. Now Hamilton is testing his own luck. Or maybe he's testing something else.

Because beyond the pragmatic reasons why Hamilton might have chosen to move on—Mercedes' lackluster results with a series of joyless cars, Ferrari's improving form, the king's ransom Hamilton is rumored to be paid—there's something priceless that Ferrari could offer that Mercedes never could: a fresh start.