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
