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Drive announcements don’t come much bigger than this.
Hamilton’s shock defection from Mercedes to Ferrari — announced just five months after signing a fresh two-year contract and enabled by a prescient get-out clause — took Formula 1 by total surprise just weeks ahead of the first race of the season.
It’s rare for Formula 1 contract negotiations to reach their conclusions without leaking, yet Hamilton and Ferrari managed to do their deal almost entirely under the cover of darkness, with media getting wind of the switch only hours before confirmation.
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It ensured that the seven-time champion’s decision to leave his team of more than a decade for a fairytale flight to famous Ferrari will go down as one of the sport’s all-time biggest contract announcements.
The ripples from a move as seismic as this reach far and wide through the paddock, and while Hamilton and Ferrari will count themselves as winners, a trail of losers lie in their wake.
WINNER: LEWIS HAMILTON
At the end of last season Lewis Hamilton made a telling admission into his mindset after two winless campaigns in the forlorn pursuit of an eighth championship.
“I’m in a place in my life where there’s no way I can win,” he said, per The Race.
“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.”
But moving to Ferrari changes that equation.
Regardless of whether his competitive outlook improves, Hamilton will be reinvigorated by the challenge of acclimatising to a new environment — and bringing his title-winning experience to a new team — after 12 years with the same constructor.
And not just any team — racing for Ferrari is a dream for any driver good enough to crack F1.
But there is a logic to the move beyond the old saying that change is as good as a holiday.
By the end of last season Ferrari looked like a surer bet than Mercedes to push Red Bull Racing in the short term. Frédéric Vasseur has reformed the team, and Maranello has the resources to close the gap by 2026, if not earlier.
Hamilton could only emerge from this gamble as a loser if Mercedes were to pull a blinder and become a title contender in the next two seasons, but the Briton considered that a low possibility even before he pulled the ripcord.
“We’ve got to hope for the next six months to be the greatest six months of development that we’ve ever had to close that gap and to be really banging on the door,” he told Sky Sports late last year.
In almost every conceivable situation, Hamilton wins big from his move.
LOSER: MERCEDES
Short of that miraculous competitive turnaround, the vote of no confidence in Mercedes will sting all the way through this year and into 2025.
A team doesn’t simply recover from losing the faith of the greatest driver of all time, never mind the driver around which it built almost all its title success over the last decade. That the team lost control of the narrative thanks to some leaking to the Italian media only adds salt to the wound.
And that’s all before the team considers how to replace a seven-time champion — they’re not exactly common currency.
The early announcement of Hamilton’s 2025 departure will make for a weird atmosphere this season. While team and driver will undoubtedly give their all — their relationship is a long and successful one — Hamilton will be phased out of engineering and development meetings before long.
Ironically the situation might be most difficult if Mercedes does manage to wheel out a shock winner. Dealing even-handedly with outbound Hamilton up against long-term bet George Russell would become an increasingly difficult equation.
Whatever happens this year, spinning this into a positive will be almost impossible for the once mighty Mercedes.
WINNER: FERRARI
Ferrari has snatched a seven-time champion from under the nose of rival Mercedes in one of the sport’s biggest driver market coups — that’s a huge win just by title alone.
Just as losing Hamilton can be read as a vote of no confidence in Mercedes, his decision to join Ferrari until at least the end of 2026 is a big vote for the team’s prospects.
It’s also a massive tick for team principal Frédéric Vasseur, whose work revitalising Ferrari appears to be paying big dividends.
Though few have doubts about Charles Leclerc’s raw speed, in Hamilton the team will benefit from a complete package and a known quantity. There’ll be no doubt that what Hamilton can extract from the car is the maximum available. That will also push Leclerc to find another level in his ongoing development.
Though reports linking an 11.6 per cent jump in Ferrari share price to the Hamilton announcement are wide of the mark — Ferrari also happened to release better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings on the same day — metaphorically there’s no doubt Ferrari ends this week with its F1 stocks well up.
LOSER WITH POSSIBLE SILVER LINING: CARLOS SAINZ
Hamilton’s arrival will displace Carlos Sainz at the end of the year, extending the Spaniard’s frustrating search for a long-term home.
Sainz’s fourth and final year with Ferrari will represent the longest he’s spent at any one team, having jumped from Toro Rosso to Renault to McLaren in the seven years before arriving in Maranello.
Sainz deserved a chance to continue his strong growth at Ferrari. He was the team’s best performer for most of 2023, including in Singapore, where he secured the only non-Red Bull Racing victory of the season.
But his technical and analytical mind — with which he almost single-handedly kept Ferrari performing respectably through the middle of the year — will be sought after for teams looking to make the next step.
Mercedes would be an obvious destination for a straight switch.
But there are also the long-running rumours that Sauber — currently branded Stake, formerly Alfa Romeo — CEO Andreas Seidl wants him to spearhead Audi’s works entry when the German brand completes its buyout in 2026.
Ferrari always gave the sense that Sainz was the de facto number two to Leclerc. Seidl rated Sainz highly during their time together at McLaren.
Perhaps this is the situation Sainz needs to suffer to arrive at a team he can truly call his own.
WINNER: FORMULA 1
The driver market for the 2024 season was the dampest of squibs, with no seats set to change hands before the first race of the year for the first time in the sport’s history.
The silver lining was that more than half the grid would start this season in a contract year, promising a far sillier silly season, albeit no-one could have imagined it would start this early.
It’s exactly the tonic F1 needs after one of the most one-sided year in history and with Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing starting another year as overwhelming favourites.
It sets up some fascinating storylines as Hamilton prepares to switch teams, and it guarantees anticipation will be extraordinarily high for 2025, ensuring the sport will have plenty to talk about on the way to the big regulation changes of 2026 regardless of how competitive the on-track action is.
LOSER BUT WITH UPSIDE: CHARLES LECLERC
Charles Leclerc has been told implicitly and sometimes explicitly that he’s Ferrari leading man and the central pillar of the team’s journey to a drought-breaking championship. He’s proved time and time again that he has the speed to contend.
Now he has Lewis Hamilton encroaching on his turf.
That represents an immediate blow to his status and prestige inside a team he’s been able to call his own for so long.
The only way to wrestle back power is on the track.
The incumbent Leclerc will likely have an early advantage over Hamilton as the Briton acclimatises to a dramatically new environment. He also has the linguistic advantage of speaking Italian at a team that for better or worse has de facto national team status.
But it won’t take long for Hamilton to bring himself up to speed, and when he does, the sport’s most prolific qualifier and winner will be the sternest test Leclerc will likely ever face.
In some senses there are more ways for Leclerc to win than lose. Age is on his side, meaning he only really needs to match Hamilton to emerge with his reputation unscathed and maybe even enhanced when Lewis eventually calls it quits.
But defeat to Hamilton carries much larger stakes.
Right now Leclerc occupies the same high status as Hamilton, Verstappen, Norris and Alonso as one of the clear alphas on the current grid.
Being comprehensively shown up on his own turf could leave his reputation irreparably damaged. In the worst case scenario that he’s beaten to Ferrari’s first championship in almost 20 years, it would be difficult to see how he fits into Maranello’s long-term thinking.
POTENTIAL WINNER: ALEX ALBON
While all F1 A-listers are already tied up — what might Mercedes have done had it known Hamilton’s intentions before Leclerc or Lando Norris signed new deals in January? — there are plenty of high-calibre drivers still on the market.
Alex Albon must surely fancy his chances of pinching the seat, having resurrected his career magnificently at Williams.
Though the Thai driver suffered the disappointment of being dropped by Red Bull Racing at the end of 2020, the team still highly valued his technical input, and it retained him on simulator duties that management considered crucial to Max Verstappen’s maiden championship. He also knuckled down on track, becoming a DTM winner during his gap year.
His performances at the backmarker Williams team have been extremely strong and at times exceptional in both qualifying and in the races. He’s proved he deserves a second chance at a leading team.
Albon is also a non-political player who knows George Russell well from their junior racing days, which would surely make him an as close to frictionless substitute as possible.
He would have to see off a challenge from Sainz, who boasts similar cerebral qualities, and perhaps Fernando Alonso, who would probably be a short-term solution. There’s also an outside chance rising young gun Andrea Kimi Antonelli could break through.
But Albon ticks the boxes for youth, experience and performance.
LOSER: TOTO WOLFF
Toto Wolff has done more than enough during his time as Mercedes boss to prove his worth among the pantheon of F1 team principals.
The team won an unprecedented eight constructors championships in a row on his watch — the previous best is Ferrari’s six from 1999 to 2004 — and no marque has ever won seven consecutive drivers titles.
And yet still he faces accusations of inheriting the successful foundations of the team from Ross Brawn — accusations that will be harder to bat away this year.
Every golden era comes to an end eventually. The challenge for Wolff is to reinvent Mercedes to become a winning team again, much in the same way Christian Horner has rebuild Red Bull Racing — much though Wolff would baulk at that comparison.
The loss of personnel in recent years capped off by the departure of Hamilton — with whom Wolff’s talked of having an extremely close bond — will ramp up pressure to prove he can steady the ship and steer it back to glory.
LOSER: DRIVE TO SURVIVE
Finally, spare a thought for the producers of Drive to Survive, who for months have been attempting to painstakingly craft an engaging docudrama series about one of the most straightforward seasons in F1 history — only to have interest in last year obliterated by a seismic off-season.
Between Guenther Steiner’s sacking as Haas team boss, the unfolding Andretti saga and now the biggest driver move in a generation, will anyone really care about the 2023 recap?
Suddenly it feels like the timing of the release — between testing and the first race, when all the major players from the last month’s big events will be speaking to media to set up the season ahead — feels badly out of place, leaving the hit show facing the prospect of being yesterday’s news before it even had a chance to shine.
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