As the unmistakeable silhouette of Lewis Hamilton emerged out of the fog, London’s O2 Arena erupted. The seven-time Formula 1 world champion, wearing red overalls and flanked by new teammate Charles Leclerc and team principal Frédéric Vasseur, waved to the crowd, a huge smile beaming on his face. It felt like the start of something groundbreaking.
Ferrari’s unveiling at the preseason F1 75 launch event in February was the loudest of the sport’s 10 teams, and by some margin. Hamilton was buzzing from his big move from Mercedes, one that had quite literally been a year in the making. The sport’s biggest name joining its biggest team, one in a title drought stretching back to 2008. The 40-year-old Englishman told the crowd he felt “invigorated” by his new challenge. He and Leclerc had both driven the new car at the team’s Fiorano test track and were quietly confident about the year ahead. They were even spending their time as new teammates repeatedly playing each other at online chess.
The vibes, as the kids say, were immaculate. Hamilton looked like a man reborn. It felt like Ferrari had maybe added the last missing ingredient to its F1 operation.
But that was then.
Fast forward to now, and the hype and excitement that Hamilton brought with him to Ferrari has disappeared so quickly that it’s hard to believe it ever existed at all. McLaren, who Ferrari nearly beat to the constructors’ championship last year, quickly emerged all conquering. Hamilton’s sprint race win in China in April and a handful of grand prix podium finishes from Leclerc are all the Italian team has to show for 2025 going into the summer break. Both Mercedes and Red Bull, who trail Ferrari in the standings, can at least point to a grand prix win this year.
Worst of all, Hamilton’s giddy invigoration appears to have given way to complete surrender. Anyone who has been worn down by years of following Ferrari’s F1 rollercoaster could flippantly say it only took the Italian team 14 races to destroy the morale of the greatest driver of all time. Perhaps Hamilton’s comments in Budapest, in which he said he was “absolutely useless,” will be how this big-money move will be remembered. Time will tell.
By Sunday evening, Hamilton seemed just about ready to throw in the towel altogether. “They probably need to change drivers,” a downbeat Hamilton had said on Saturday after being eliminated from Q1 in a session in which Leclerc remarkably stuck it on pole. It was a remarkable statement from someone reportedly on a £60 million-a-year contract, the man with more poles and victories than anyone else. It is fair to wonder what Ferrari chairman John Elkann, who ultimately parted company with that money to bring him to the team, must have thought hearing such a defeatist viewpoint.
After finishing 12th, his mood was little better. He cryptically said “there’s a lot going on in the background … that’s not great.” In response to a question about the Dutch Grand Prix, which follows the three-week August break, he said, “Hopefully I will be back, yeah.” Ferrari’s home race, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, a pilgrimage of sorts for the team’s legendary tifosi, takes place seven days later.
Given where things were just months ago, it is staggering to see how quickly things have changed. While Hamilton has repeatedly said his focus is being fully bedded in in time for the the 2026 rule change Ferrari hopes will catapult it to the front of the pecking order, Hamilton is neither speaking nor driving like a man who looks capable of rising to that challenge should that happen.
Things were only slightly better in the other Ferrari on Sunday. While Leclerc’s sublime pole lap had triggered Hamilton’s comments, the way his race unfolded was painfully familiar to anyone who has followed this team in the modern era. It was a race win that appeared to be tantalizingly possible — until, very suddenly, it didn’t. Ferrari fans will know the feeling all too well. Leclerc’s radio messages had a familiar ring to them.
“We are going to lose this race with these things. We are losing so much time,” he said at one stage. He later added: “This is so incredibly frustrating. We’ve lost all competitiveness. You just have to listen to me … It’s a miracle if we finish on the podium.”
Leclerc was correct. Having led the early stages of the race, his car’s pace dropped off a cliff at the end, and he slid helplessly to fourth.
He then returned to what has become a well-rehearsed shtick at this point. Having been critical of the team over team radio during the race, when facing down the glare of the lights in the TV media pen, he walked back his criticisms. “I spoke too quickly,” he said shortly after the checkered flag, pointing to a chassis issue and not the setup changes at the final pit stop he felt had ruined the groove he’d been in all weekend. The explanation might have been a valid one, but the criticize-and-retract routine is slightly weary by this point. It only reinforced that lingering feeling that in Leclerc, Ferrari have a mega-talented nice guy who is hard on the team when he’s speaking in the sanctuary of the cockpit, but less so once he’s climbed out.
But Ferrari can take at least comfort from Leclerc’s incredible ability to make something out of nothing. The same cannot be said of Hamilton. The Hungarian Grand Prix was a weekend where there were no positives to take from the man in the number 44 car.
Is Hamilton done?
At best, Hamilton’s comments were highly alarming. Whether viewed as he said them on TV or read after the fact, they appeared to have been uttered by someone considering waving the white flag and calling it quits there and then. At one point in his interview with Sky Sports F1 on Sunday evening, he appeared to be genuinely struggling to speak without breaking down.
Anyone who has followed Hamilton’s career may recognize it as part of the emotional range that has made him such a captivating part of the sport for so long. His pendulum of emotions has always been one of absolute extremes. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, who along with Hamilton built the greatest dynasty the sport has ever seen, recognized that when asked about it on Sunday evening.
“That is Lewis wearing his heart on his sleeve,” Wolff said. “It was very raw. He was down on himself. We had it in the past when he felt that he’d underperformed in his own expectations. He has been that emotionally transparent since he was a young adult. He will beat himself up.”
Just a week earlier ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix, Hamilton had been in a defiant, confident mood. He told the media how he was determined not to follow the example of fellow legends Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel in failing to win a championship for Ferrari. Hamilton revealed that he had been writing documents for the team highlighting the areas where it was underperforming. It was exactly the kind of thing Ferrari should welcome: a man with so much experience pointing out flaws in the operation of a team lacking real F1 title-winning experience at every level.
On the back of that revelation, though, it is hard to escape the obvious fact. Two of Hamilton’s worst weekends driving in a red car followed that revelation about the documents. A cynic could easily say that, while Alonso and Vettel did not ultimately claim the big one for Enzo Ferrari’s team, both won early in their debut season and left the team with win tallies in double figures. Bar that weekend in Shanghai, Hamilton hasn’t looked close to doing either of those things.
Perhaps that goes some way to explain the latest bout of emotional transparency Wolff alluded to. Mercedes saw plenty of it in the years following Hamilton’s agonizing 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. In the final months of his tenure with the team last year, even with the emotional high of his wonderful 2024 British Grand Prix victory, self doubt was clear. The man with more pole positions than anyone else finished his tenure with the Silver Arrows publicly stating that he had lost his previous one-lap magic.
The emotional rollercoaster has been apparent this year. His sprint pole and win in Shanghai proved to be a fleeting high. After finishing fourth in Austria and then in Great Britain, setbacks on successive weekends in Belgium and Hungary coming into the summer break have moved the needle to the wrong end of the scale.
Outwardly, Ferrari has not displayed any lingering concerns about Hamilton’s spiraling form and increasing self defeatism. Vasseur has downplayed the situation.
“I don’t need to motivate him,” Vasseur said on Sunday evening. “Honestly, he’s frustrated, but not demotivated … Sometimes just after the race or just after the [qualifying], you are very disappointed and the first reaction is harsh, but we all know that we are pushing in the same direction.”
Numerous theories have been put forward to explain Hamilton’s struggles this year. No doubt, he’s been outwardly frustrated on numerous occasions by Ferrari’s race strategy — his interactions with race engineer Riccardo Adami often sound more like two incompatible people on an awkward blind date than Formula 1 race driver and race engineer — but it is unfair to simply point at Ferrari, especially after a weekend when his teammate was on pole and should have finished on the podium.
The issues go beyond Budapest. Hamilton’s form has just not been at the level anyone expected. The timing of his switching teams could be one explanation. One trend this year has been how, in the final year of the regulation cycle, drivers have struggled to switch into new cars; Carlos Sainz, who had to make way for Hamilton at Ferrari, has been similarly inconsistent at Williams.
Hamilton has spoken about just how different things are at Ferrari to Mercedes. At the start of the year, he and Sainz joked about how their new teams plot lap charts in opposite ways to how they’re accustomed to, meaning both started the year looking at data that appeared to be upside down. While that might be the case, Hamilton’s achievements and his legacy to this point serve as a double-edged sword: even if it is a bad time to have moved teams, the excuse does not wash when you boast the greatest statistics the sport has ever seen. Whether Sainz, a multiple race winner himself, is struggling is irrelevant in comparison to a competitor with a legacy like Hamilton’s.
Perhaps the Englishman’s struggles at the Hungaroring, scene of his first win for Mercedes in 2013 and a place considered to be one of his strongest circuits, reinforced the feeling of how he has simply not been able to make the difference he was used to making at his former team.
Much was made of a visit Hamilton paid to Mercedes at Spa-Francorchamps, seven days before the race in Budapest. Both Hamilton and Mercedes said it was simply a visit to catch up with old colleagues and to give his struggling replacement, Italian teenager Kimi Antonelli, an encouraging pat on the back. But it came off the back of a similarly frank set of comments made to the media after being eliminated from Q1 in qualifying for both the sprint and the grand prix. Perhaps it is not surprising that at such a moment of low confidence, Hamilton sought out the familiarity of his championship-winning days, even if for a fleeting visit.
All of this would have seemed unthinkable to the crowd at the O2 Arena back in February. The vibes, once so good, are now sour.
Hamilton still has time to turn things around. Ferrari might well still come out of the blocks as the team to beat next season, but after Budapest, the question isn’t as much whether Ferrari can give him a title-winning car, it’s whether he still believes he’s a driver who can win with one.
Of all the problems at Ferrari, that might be the most alarming one of all.
