By Joshua Robinson

From the moment Lewis Hamilton strode through the gates at Ferrari's historic Maranello campus outside Modena, Italy, he became the star of his own Italian opera.

The hero, the greatest driver Formula One has ever known, was living out his childhood dream, having joined Ferrari, and things couldn't be going better. He posed in front of the house where Enzo Ferrari, the team's founder, had lived. He pulled on the famous red overalls. And he even chuckled through a few words of Italian. The F1 world couldn't help but applaud.

Then Hamilton actually squeezed into his race car, and a harsher reality began to set in.

After winning six of his record seven world championships in a Mercedes, adapting to a new team with new terminology, new colleagues and a new teammate in Charles Leclerc was always going to be a challenge. But how quickly Hamilton could make it work instantly became the headline story of the 2025 season.

So far, it's been rockier than anyone expected. The 40-year-old Hamilton crashed one car during testing in Italy, scraped into 10th place at the first Grand Prix of the season in Australia, and found himself stripped of a result in the second race in China when both Ferraris in the race were disqualified for technical violations. Through five races, he has only cracked the top six once and has yet to reach the podium.

"Hopefully we won't do that again as I continue to learn this car," Hamilton said after his disqualification in Shanghai. "Obviously we're losing ground to the McLarens points-wise...but we've just got to keep pushing." McLaren is currently first in the F1 team standings.

A risky move

What makes every episode of this saga so compelling is that Hamilton signing for Ferrari was a surefire success off the track, and a risky bet on it.

In addition to holding nearly every major record in Formula One and being the sport's first and only Black driver, Hamilton is also a style icon and globe-trotting A-lister. His personal brand merging with the heritage, glamour and sex appeal of Ferrari was always going to be a winner. (Hamilton's first photos in front of Enzo Ferrari's house turning into the most popular Instagram posts in F1 history confirmed that much.)

When it came to the business of actually winning races, however, things weren't so clear-cut. In Formula One, the 10 teams spend a 24-race season competing on two fronts at once. The drivers, two per squad, rack up points for their teams in the Constructors' Championship and for themselves as individuals in the drivers' standings. Ferrari hasn't claimed either title since 2008.

Not only that, but Ferrari has spent the past six years invested in turning Leclerc, a talented 27-year-old from Monaco, into a world champion. He's the one the Italian media dubbed Il Predestinato, the chosen one. Only now the team has dropped the F1 GOAT squarely into the Ferrari garage he once ruled, and Leclerc has to play it cool. "Ferrari is my life," he told reporters over the offseason. "It will be a nice duel with Hamilton."

Ferrari insists that there is no hierarchy between its drivers -- its army of scarlet-clad engineers and mechanics will do everything to help both men win. But in this odd dynamic, Leclerc and Hamilton are both teammates and rivals, driving nearly identical machines, with finely honed instincts to elbow each other for every millisecond on the road. It's up to Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur to referee the fight and remind Hamilton and Leclerc that they aren't just competing for themselves -- they're racing for the Prancing Horse painted on their cars.

"At no time can that battle between them cost the team a single point," Vasseur says. "At the same time, I don't want to put on the brakes, because that's where the performance comes from."

F1 heritage

Vasseur knows just how high the stakes are for Ferrari, which occupies a singular place in the sport. The Scuderia, as it's also known, is the only team to compete in every single season since the series began in 1950. As the sport's former boss Bernie Ecclestone used to put it, "Ferrari is Formula One and Formula One is Ferrari."

Still, should Vasseur fail to win a Constructors' Championship, the team's dry spell would reach 17 years, the longest since Enzo first entered one of his cars in a Grand Prix.

Standing in his way is an ascendant McLaren team that narrowly beat Ferrari for the 2024 title, a quickly improving Mercedes team, and as always, Red Bull, whose lead driver Max Verstappen has won the past four drivers' crowns. And with its calamitous start to the season, the Scuderia has spotted all of them a head start. Five races in and going into Miami, Ferrari sits in fourth place.

Hamilton is confident that a turnaround is coming soon -- after all, the season lasts until December. In the longer term, he is betting that Ferrari will be back among the leaders when wholesale regulation changes come into effect next year, radically altering the technical specifications of the sport.

Meanwhile, Hamilton will continue to draw the spotlight for the late-career move that rocked F1 -- whether he starts winning or not. And if there's one driver who has proven he can cope with the burning levels of attention that come with being a seven-time world champion racing for the sport's most storied, most neurotic team, it's him.

"He's one of the only drivers who really knows how to compartmentalize his life," Vasseur says. "He can spend one day doing marketing, the next day doing fashion, and the third discussing his front left tire with an engineer."

Joshua Robinson is a Wall Street Journal editor in New York. Email him at joshua.robinson@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 28, 2025 23:00 ET (03:00 GMT)

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