Lewis Hamilton heads into the 2025 Formula 1 season with more questions hanging over him than ever before. The seven-time world champion moves to Ferrari amid high expectations – from himself, from the team and from the fans – with the highest salary he has ever received, after the worst season of his career.

Although Hamilton ended a win drought that dated back two and a half years with victories at the British and Belgian grands prix, seventh in the championship is the lowest he has ever finished. And he was comprehensively outpaced by a team-mate for the first time. George Russell outqualified him 19 times to five at an average advantage over the season of 0.171sec.

In 2025, Hamilton moves to a team like no other. For a start, it’s in another country. More than that, it is of another country. It’s the Italian national team, and as such the fans feel connected to it in a way that is different from any other outfit in F1.

Hamilton will have to assimilate to the team and this different attitude and expectation, and while doing so the driver on the other side of the garage is reputed to be perhaps the fastest of all. Many people in F1 think there is a decent chance Hamilton could lose at least the qualifying battle to Charles Leclerc next season.

His 12th and final season at Mercedes has changed a lot around Hamilton. When his Ferrari move was announced in February, it was seen as a win-win for both him and Ferrari. Hamilton was moving to a team clearly in better shape than the one he was leaving and the perception was that Ferrari was clearly upgrading its driver, swapping someone very good in Carlos Sainz for an all-time great, the most successful in history.

“As Vasseur’s no-nonsense leadership has taken effect, the team has made significant strides”

On the team side of things, nothing has changed. Mercedes had a purple patch in 2024, which coincided almost exactly with Ferrari’s weakest period of the season. But over the 24 races Ferrari clearly had the better car, narrowly missing out on the constructors’ championship and finishing the season 184 points ahead of Mercedes.

Hamilton’s season was less positive. As it neared its denouement, Hamilton even went as far as to say he was “definitely not fast any more” after another qualifying disappointment in Qatar. Such was Hamilton’s 2024 that, as crazy as it might sound to some, there were even questions from some quarters as to whether he really would signify the upgrade in the cockpit Ferrari had every reason to expect when it signed him.

Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur, though, dismisses these questions. Vasseur, who has known Hamilton since he ran him in the junior categories 20 years ago and was instrumental in signing him, says he was “never, never, never worried about the situation” throughout Hamilton’s struggles in 2024. Vasseur points to Hamilton’s strong end-of-season races in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi. In Sin City, Hamilton moved up from 10th on the grid to finish on the tail of team-mate George Russell in a Mercedes 1-2. Mistakes on both qualifying laps had clearly deprived him of a likely victory.

In Abu Dhabi, Hamilton again excelled. Although overshadowed by Leclerc’s stunning drive to third from 19th on the grid, Hamilton’s from 16th to fourth, passing Russell around the outside of Turn 9 on the last lap, was almost as good.

Vasseur believes the difficulties inherent in driving for a team for an entire season knowing you are leaving at the end of it were instrumental in his struggles.

“Even when we had a tough journey the team reaction was very good”

“I am really convinced, and I don’t want to blame Lewis or Mercedes, this situation is not easy to manage,” Vasseur says. “And I can understand it if it is not going well. You can suffer in this relationship. He was not very well in his mind and he was clear about this in Brazil but he also did very well on the last couple of events and I am not worried at all.”

Explanations for Hamilton’s qualifying struggles in 2024 are not easy to find. One is clearly that Russell is very fast indeed, and perhaps underrated as a qualifier. This is the man who put a Williams second on the grid at Spa in the wet in 2021, after all, and between him and Hamilton there had been nothing to choose over one lap in the first two seasons together, Russell edging the battle the first year, Hamilton the second.

Without doubt, some of Hamilton’s issues were that he sometimes simply over-drove the car when it came to the final part of qualifying, trying to find the last gains. And he found the particular characteristics of the 2024 Mercedes harder to handle.

“If you look for a common theme,” says Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin, “we have a car that is difficult to turn in the slower corners, and the way the drivers have to turn it is by sliding the rear on the way in and sliding the rear on the power on the way out. That adds [tyre] temperature, and dealing with that problem Lewis has found quite difficult.

“You could argue that Lewis was head and shoulders the best in the previous set of regulations. He certainly found driving the cars second nature. Lewis would set up the car so that, as the [rear of the] car came up [during braking] and you gained pitch, it would help you turn the car, and he relied on those elements. And that was how you generated performance in the previous set of regulations.

“He has struggled more with the way these cars run. These cars you need to run lower, you need to run stiffer, they are banging into the ground more, you haven’t got as much movement in the platform from low to high speed.”

Hamilton saw it more as a problem of car behaviour, particularly the rear. “It’s very unpredictable,” he said of the Mercedes towards the end of the season. “The floor’s working and then it stops and starts. That’s been the problem.”

Ferrari, too, has had its problems with stability in recent times. The car bequeathed to Vasseur in his first season as team boss in 2023 was evil to begin with, to the extent that the drivers struggled to keep it on the track. But as Vasseur’s straightforward, no-nonsense leadership has taken effect, the team has made significant strides. By the end of 2023, the Ferrari was the second fastest car to Red Bull, and Leclerc would surely have won in Las Vegas had it not been for an inopportunely timed safety car.

Last season started in the same way. There was a blip when a new floor introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix brought aerodynamic bouncing. In previous years the team might have lost its way, started some kind of internal blame game – think of the way development failed in 2022 despite the team starting the year with the fastest car.

But under Vasseur’s calm, clear guidance, Ferrari knuckled down and before long was back to form, Leclerc winning in Monza and Austin and Sainz in Mexico to close in on McLaren, and finish the season just 14 points adrift of the title.

Vasseur says Hamilton has long had a desire to join Ferrari. “He had the project to drive for Ferrari in his mind for at least 22 or 23 years because we were discussing this in 2004,” he said at the team’s Christmas lunch at the end of 2024. “It was not too difficult [to convince him].

“Sometimes it is also a matter of coincidence or to align all the planets, that he is on the market, that Ferrari has a seat available and so on. The contact was an easy one. We started to discuss one year ago and it was not difficult to convince him.”

Vasseur’s remark about the planets aligning is accurate in more ways than one. This is the right time for Hamilton to join Ferrari – before Vasseur’s arrival, the team was probably not right for him.

Under the late Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne, who ousted Luca di Montezemolo, and installed as team principal first Marco Mattiacci in 2014 and then Maurizio Arrivabene the following year, the team was very different in outlook.

Whether or not it was a reaction to the cosmopolitan Michael Schumacher era Montezemolo created, when the team was led by Jean Todt, and engineering and design by Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, under Marchionne the team became very Italian-focused. And very much not a place that worked in a collegiate, empathetic way with drivers.

Perhaps this was part of the reason for the unravelling of Sebastian Vettel’s title challenge in 2017 and 2018. When Mattia Binotto replaced Arrivabene for 2019, he attempted to instil a no-blame culture, but failed when it became essentially a no-responsibility one and the strategy errors and reliability failures in 2022 were allowed to continue. This led to Binotto’s replacement and the arrival of Vasseur, who has a very different approach.

Vasseur’s leadership is about enablement and collectivity. “Even when we had a tough journey in July,” he says, “the team reaction was very good. We never blamed a person or department and we worked together to come back and to find solutions between the different groups and it went well.

“It would have been better to not have the issue, but the reaction was good and it is what we are expecting for the future if we want to fight for the championship.

“To fix a goal for the team is to work as a team and not blame someone when you have an issue. It is easy to say but it is not easy to do when you have the pressure of the races. I was not there before and I can’t judge the past but I am very proud of the team this year.”

Vasseur has also reverted to a more outward-looking recruitment philosophy, a move symbolised by the promotion of ex-Mercedes designer Loic Serra, a Frenchman, to the role of chassis technical director following the departure of Enrico Cardile to Aston Martin, and the recruitment of Belgian ex-F1 driver Jerome d’Ambrosio – also formerly of Mercedes – as deputy team principal.

Vasseur says: “Part of the performance is the transfer of know-how. We recruited and it has nothing to do with passport, it is more about culture and to look at what the others are doing. We recruited a lot from the other teams, including drivers.

“Part of the input of Lewis is also because he is coming with the experience of Mercedes and this is important for development. We are fighting for hundredths of seconds. On average the difference between us and the guy in front of us on the grid over the season is 0.03secs and this means that every single bit you can get from everywhere, it is always positive.”

“A record eighth title driving for F1’s most iconic team would be huge ”

Like Vasseur, Hamilton does not speak Italian. He is expected to make an effort to change this, but as an Englishman who does not speak any other languages and turned 40 in January, it will likely not be easy. Vasseur jokes that learning Italian is “a touchy subject for me”, but adds: “You know that 99% of the job is in English but it’s good to speak a little bit of Italian for the mechanics and the relationship in the team but I am not sure it is crucial for the performance.”

Schumacher, too, spoke hardly any Italian, which is as much knowledge as you need to know that the tifosi will love Hamilton as long as he does the business on the track. Inevitably, expectations in Italy are high about his arrival.

Vasseur says he expects another close fight between the top four teams in 2025, and if Ferrari can build on its strong finish to last year, Hamilton could be in the title fight in his first season there.

The impact of losing the chance to win a record eighth title as a consequence of race director Michael Masi overriding two rules regarding safety car restarts at Abu Dhabi in 2021 has hung over Hamilton and Mercedes ever since. The failure of the team to provide him a car in which he could right what he perceived as that wrong has been large in Hamilton’s mind.

The chances of doing so were certainly a factor in the decision to join Ferrari, along with his desire for a longer contract than Mercedes was prepared to offer him, fulfilling a long-held dream, and the small matter of a close-to 50% pay rise to a reputed €65m (£54m) salary.

The impact should the only driver who truly transcends the sport win a record eighth title driving for its most iconic team would be huge.

But to do so, not only does Ferrari have to deliver as a team, but Hamilton has to beat Leclerc. Hamilton might be the all-time pole position record holder, but Leclerc’s prowess over one lap is well-established across recent seasons.

Some make reference to the relatively poor conversion rate of poles to wins across his career so far. Leclerc has 26 poles but just eight victories. However, a glance through his record is all it takes to see that ratio is a reflection of a combination of factors very few of which are down to Leclerc. A significant one of which, along with previous strategy, operational and reliability failures on Ferrari’s part, is the fact that his raw speed has essentially often been qualifying cars faster than their competitive level in race trim can sustain.

Leclerc’s strong 2024 season, his most consistent yet, with some superb drives including his three wins in Monaco, Monza and Austin, as well as that stunning performance in Abu Dhabi, further underlines the task facing Hamilton.

Throughout 2024, it was clear how much Hamilton was affected by Russell’s better qualifying performances. Hamilton fluctuated from seeing a conspiracy to complete befuddlement.

Given Leclerc’s talent, it’s certainly a possibility that even allowing for the fact that Hamilton has the excitement of a new environment to motivate him – and maybe, too, a car he gets on with better – it is at least a possibility that he will be facing the same situation again. Perhaps even more so.

Hamilton at least has to allow for it, and some insiders feel he will have to play to his strengths and use what he will probably consider his greater guile, experience and race-craft to see him through. It’s a manner perhaps akin to when Jody Scheckter managed to beat Gilles Villeneuve to the title when they were team-mates at Ferrari back in 1979, or how Niki Lauda beat Alain Prost at McLaren in 1984. Certainly, Leclerc is the modern F1 driver who most resembles Villeneuve, not just with his exciting, attacking driving style, but also his straightforward and direct character.

“Leclerc is the modern F1 driver who most resembles Villeneuve”

As well as being on paper the strongest driver line-up in F1, Hamilton and Leclerc complement each other in more ways than one. With Leclerc, Hamilton will face none of the manipulation and calculation that caused his relationship with Nico Rosberg to deteriorate, and not only do they both want similar things from a car, but they drive similarly, too.

Hamilton and Leclerc are both seat-of-their-pants, natural drivers – hence their joint predilection for ‘where did that come from?’ pole laps – who thrive on cars with a strong front end and a nicely predictable rear they can manipulate with their skills. If Ferrari can give them that, they will make a formidable pairing.

It might not be an easy combination to manage, but Vasseur sees only positives in what he expects to be the intense competition between the two.

“It is always a challenge,” he says. “I had my challenges between Charles and Carlos but I think it was part of our performance. Between Charles and Carlos we had some moments, Monza ’23 or Vegas ’24. But at the end of the day it was beneficial for the performance of the team.

“Charles, Lewis… I am not particularly worried about this. They have a huge mutual respect, they know each other, they have been talking about this for months now, and I think it is much better to fight for (positions) one, two or three, than to fight for 19-20th.

“It is a good issue for a team to have this kind of discussion and approach and I am really convinced again that the performance of the team is coming from the emulation between the two.”

Hamilton, Leclerc and a Ferrari that promises to be competitive. The one certainty going into 2025 is that it will be box-office gold, however it turns out.

Andrew Benson is the BBC’s Formula 1 correspondent