Lewis Hamilton to drive for Ferrari from 2025, replacing Carlos Sainz Jr.

For two years, Lewis Hamilton has seen red in the cockpit of his Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 cars. Part of that was a red mist, Hamilton undoubtedly angry about Mercedes getting its car concept so badly wrong when teams had to develop new cars for the 2022 Formula 1 season. And part of that was from watching the scarlet Ferraris pass his team by. The Italian outfit beat Mercedes to second place in the Manufacturer’s Championship in 2022, and although Mercedes beat Ferrari by 3 points in 2023, Mercedes has taken one pole position and won a single race in the past two years, Ferrari has started on pole 19 times and won five races. Hamilton signed another two-year contract with Mercedes last year, but reports now say the contract included an escape clause. It appears Hamilton, who’s 39, decided to put the clause to use.    

Hamilton will partner with Charles Leclerc, the Monegasque driver having signed another long-term contract last year that keeps him at Ferrari until the end of 2026. There were rumors even before Leclerc signed about holdups with a contract for his teammate, Carlos Sainz Jr. All Ferrari team principal Cedric Vasseur would say publicly is that everything would be taken care of. Racer reports that during those Sainz discussions, Ferrari company Chairman John Elkann heard there was a chance to get Hamilton. Well, everything’s certainly been taken care of, to Elkann and Vasseur’s satisfaction and everyone else’s surprise.

Hamilton will restart a working relationship with Vasseur, who founded the ART Grand Prix team that Hamilton won the Formula 3 title with in 2005 and the GP2 title with in 2006. He also gets to Ferrari one year before the regulations change again, in 2026. It’s possible an earlier Mercedes move having to do with a previous regulation change foreshadowed this one. Loic Serra joined Mercedes F1 in 2010 and left in 2023, spending his final five years in Brackley as the team’s performance director. When Mercedes began developing the “zero sidepod” W13 car for the 2022 season, Serra reportedly told the team the car concept wouldn’t work. Hamilton said he also told the team the car wasn’t going in the proper direction. After Ferrari hired Cedric Vasseur at the end of 2022, who did Vasseur make his first big external hire in July 2023? Loic Serra, who also officially begins his role in Maranello at the beginning of 2025.

Hamilton heads to Italy with his record 103 wins and 104 pole positions, and record-tying seven F1 Driver’s Championships. The signing creates one of the best driver pairings on the grid, and would love to recreate the kind of glory Ferrari hasn’t basked in since Michael Schumacher’s last championship in 2004 — Schumacher being the only other driver with seven titles. Hamilton also follows in the footsteps of what can only be considered failed campaigns in red by Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel.

Assuming all this goes down the way it looks now, Hamilton will be 40 when he joins the Scuderia, and he’ll hope to prove Ferrari isn’t a graveyard for late-career, championship-winning drivers who love the scarlet but who built their reputations and won their trophies elsewhere.