Hamilton, the worst season before his biggest challenge

When the future arrival of Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari was announced, it was a real earthquake that shook the world of Formula 1. This alliance of the two greatest winners of the discipline, sometimes mentioned in the past but which seemed to all the more improbable as the Briton is nearing the end of his career, immediately aroused enormous enthusiasm and expectations.

Beyond a union that resembles a “dream team” – a dream team however made up of a Scuderia still far from its heyday and a Hamilton in his forties when he takes his first start in red -, the points of Interests were already legion on the evening of February 1, 2024, when Ferrari laconically confirmed the rumor.

Did Hamilton make the right choice? Should we favor Ferrari over Mercedes even before having driven the W15? How will he integrate into the Scuderia, he who has never known anything other than teams based in England and Mercedes engines? How will cohabitation be with the pure Ferrari product that is Charles Leclerc? Can the Briton get this famous eighth title in the team of the other seven-time world champion in the discipline, Michael Schumacher?

You have surely seen, read and heard these questions and others in the first days or weeks following the announcement. Some will, by force of circumstances, have found answers, others obviously remain open, but it is clear that more than ten months later, many others have been added, and not necessarily the most pleasant to ask. Because in the meantime, there was the 2024 campaign.

For many observers and long-time F1 fans, it was relatively easy, before this campaign, to point to Hamilton's worst season in the premier sport. In 2011, in fact, the Briton had certainly won three times but, at the wheel of a McLaren which was the second car in the field without really being able to compete over time with the Red Bull, he had multiplied the errors (and in particular a series of clashes with Felipe Massa) and had never really seemed in his right mind on a personal level.

Others will talk about 2022, his first season without a win, beaten by George Russell in the championship, but in many ways that year, besides coming out of the unfair finale of the 2021 season, was much less messy and Hamilton much more combative.

The year 2024 is still a notch above these two difficult seasons because in addition to the results at half mast with its worst ranking in the drivers' world championship – which does not necessarily mean much given that the Mercedes was clearly the fourth car of the season overall – the performance and overall attitude were far from the Briton's standards. We know he is more mentally sensitive than other drivers, but he was in turn suspicious, disillusioned, fatalistic, apathetic, even going so far as to say at the end of the season that he doubted his ability to still be fast in qualifying before withdrawing, while explaining that he was eager to get it over with…

If some people hide behind the two victories at Silverstone and Spa and behind the few other good Grands Prix which can be counted on the fingers of one hand – in a season of 24 events, that's not much – we will be able to retort that his teammate has often demonstrated, particularly at the end of the season, that there were clearly excellent results to be achieved by aligning everything.

Also, the question that arises is now the one that ends up knocking on the door of all great professional athletes past a certain age: is Hamilton still really capable of being at his best level over a full season? Even if our time is experiencing a sort of step backwards on the question of the age of athletes after the exacerbated youthism of 2000-2010, not everyone is made of the same wood. Some will say that Fernando Alonso demonstrates that he has lost none of his splendor; remains that to be honest, the Spaniard has the sad “advantage” of rarely having the car in his hands and the teammate at his side to demonstrate if this is really the case.

In truth, whether the alliance between Ferrari and Hamilton will succeed – whatever form that success might take – may currently rest more on Hamilton than Ferrari. We will be careful not to draw plans on the comet, but in view of the end of the season with a bang on the side of Maranello, it is clear that a few days before the start of their collaboration, it is above all on the capacity of the seven-time world champion to rise to this challenge that we wonder about.

Personally and even before the season, I always felt that of the three parties involved in this “transfer”, it was by far the Scuderia which risked the biggest. For Mercedes, given its current level of competitiveness, Hamilton's departure in these conditions is almost a godsend: for lack of having a car that allows it to compete for titles, as much – as Toto Wolff has also pointed out himself – not having the painful role of pushing the Briton towards the exit in a transition phase before 2026. For Hamilton, at this stage of his career, this challenge is almost too good to be true and, on a personal level , he does not have much to lose or prove in taking it up. If things go badly, it will of course be painful, but if the relationship does not turn into total acrimony, the obvious excuse will be that of his age.

On the other hand, in addition to the financial question, Ferrari is recruiting a 40-year-old driver, a seven-time world champion with the right to hope not for preferential treatment but at least equal treatment, whose last fight for the title dates back to 2021, whose emotions are sometimes on edge and who is coming out of a difficult season. If Frédéric Vasseur thinks that this is explained by the sensitivity of a driver who has sometimes lost confidence in his link with Mercedes, the same logic could apply at Ferrari where it will also be necessary to build this link under pressure particularly strong.

Let's finish by remembering that, even if these moments were quite rare during the season, Hamilton showed that he still had the sacred fire in him when the conditions were right, regardless of adversity. And then, of course, we cannot exclude the psychological dimension of having known, very quickly, that the Mercedes was not up to the competition and the long wait for its transfer to Ferrari in its performance and his attitude; it wouldn't be the first or last time something like this would happen.

But undoubtedly, we say to ourselves at the end of this year that arriving within such a team, with such a teammate and in such a context undoubtedly constitutes an even greater challenge than most of those that Hamilton has known. in his career, all while the latter is in its twilight. And this is undoubtedly the ultimate adversary of the British, the only one he cannot beat: the outrages of the passing of time.

VIDEO – Lewis Hamilton's farewell to the Mercedes factories of Brixworth and Brackley