Mark Hughes: ‘Lewis Hamilton has nothing to prove, and they’ll love him at Ferrari’ 

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, team-mates at Scuderia Ferrari from 2025, eh? That is such a mouthwatering prospect; Hamilton the most successful Formula 1 driver of all time, Leclerc often cited as the fastest man that there is over one lap.

Hamilton will be 40 years old when he first races the Ferrari, Leclerc 13 years his junior. He is taking on a huge challenge, putting his reputation on the line with the biggest imaginable spotlight upon him as the two biggest names in F1 – Ferrari and Hamilton – are paired.

But the challenge is almost certainly why he has done it. That and the squillions of dollars. Here’s what he said at the end of last year when I asked him if the idea of bouncing back to winning with Mercedes wasn’t just as exciting as joining the team back in 2013: “No. When I moved, there was an excitement. We expected it to be difficult to start off with because they hadn’t had a lot of success so there was just raw excitement, a new person on the team, getting into the nitty-gritty with everyone and building relationships. That was a different kind of excitement. This time we have known each other for years.”

There it was, and it was something I should have picked up on. Especially when he followed it up later with, “It’s a lot of pressure, being scrutinised all the time, and I’m in a place in my life where there’s no way I can win. If I win a race it’s, ‘Oh, he’s a seven-time world champion, with 103 wins.’ If I don’t do well it’s [a big deal]. I can only lose at this point in life.”

He could only lose at Mercedes is what he was telling us all, in hindsight, with that slightly despairing air, and he didn’t even sound convinced that he would win. But switching to Ferrari? That would be different. If he could win there, that would really be quite something, wouldn’t it? It would add another dimension to his career.

My guess is he will have done it with a light heart, too. This is not a pressure move despite the enormity of it and the calibre of the incumbent team-mate who will remain Ferrari’s future. Rather, it’s a move made because he has nothing to prove, wants to challenge himself and the new scenery excites him. His whole life has been about challenges and how he has taken them on. He’s particularly not shy of any challenge now he’s achieved what he’s achieved – and his father reaching out to Red Bull a year ago to see if there might be the possibility of Lewis driving there alongside Max Verstappen can be seen in this light. The bigger the challenge, the better at this stage. Maybe he’s figuring there’s no route to a world title in the next few years with anyone but Red Bull anyway and if he cannot get in there, why not Ferrari and all the excitement which that entails?

So an 11-year partnership with the Mercedes team will come to an end regardless of how competitive this year’s car is. That’s longer than any driver has been paired with a team in Formula 1 and he’s delivered them all those titles, so there’s no debt of gratitude on either side. It’s been a fantastic partnership.

“From Mercedes’ side it was time to be considering the future”

Furthermore, from Mercedes’ side it was time to be considering the future anyway. Especially given that there was an incredibly exciting prospect already on its books, a teenage sensation being dubbed the next Verstappen by everyone who’s seen him in action. Back in 2014 Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda were competing hard with Helmut Marko and Christian Horner in trying to secure the services of the then 16-year-old Max Verstappen. They lost out to Red Bull simply because Red Bull was prepared to bring him straight to F1 after just a single year of car racing. Mercedes was offering a funded GP2 seat and a subsequent move into a lower-order F1 team, perhaps Force India. Wolff kicked himself for missing out. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Andrea Kimi Antonelli is 17 and about to embark on his first season of Formula 2 – and is very much part of Mercedes’ future.

So as Hamilton and Wolff sat down in the summer of last year to discuss their future, they were very open with each other. If that openness extended as far as Wolff talking of his plans for the upcoming Antonelli – F2 in 2024, perhaps a place with the Mercedes-associated Williams in ’25 and then looking for a way to bring him onto the main team – Hamilton may have felt the push of time pointing him towards the exit door. A one-plus-one deal (one year contracted, the second year optioned) was the outcome of those discussions.

With that as his new working landscape, it’s easy to imagine Hamilton increasingly warming to the idea of Ferrari, which was prepared to offer him a longer contract and probably as much money in three years as he’d been paid by Mercedes in the previous 10.

They are going to love him at Maranello. It’s going to be a very heady affair. And Leclerc will be standing to the side off-camera, with that angelic smile, but inside him the steely conviction of putting his extraordinary talent to maximum use.

Everyone wins with this move.

Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark