Whose team is it anyway? The history against F1’s new all-star pairing and why it could explode

Lewis Hamilton’s bombshell Ferrari switch is the biggest driver move in Formula 1 history. It’s also one of the boldest.

It’s not just that a multiple world champion is switching teams. It’s that Ferrari has gone out of its way to build the strongest line-up on the grid.

Who can come close to Hamilton and Charles Leclerc?

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Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri might be up there, but they have just six grand prix victories between them, and neither has been truly challenged in the heat of a title battle.

Leclerc has more wins than the McLaren drivers combined. Hamilton’s championship history doesn’t require repeating.

Reigning four-time champion Max Verstappen is tempered by 11-time grand prix starter Liam Lawson in his debut full-time season. The in-form George Russell partners 18-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who drove a car for the first time four years ago.

Aston Martin is the only other team with a world champion in its ranks, but 43-year-old Fernando Alonso is doing a lot of heavy lifting to carry teammate Lance Stroll.

There’s a reason for this trend.

Teams may not explicitly categorise their drivers as either leaders or supporters, but when they enter the driver market, they naturally tend towards obeying this common wisdom. Every team wants a closely matched pair, but when push comes to shove, ideally one driver would demonstrate a clear edge over the other to avoid the politics and angst of having to pick winners.

It’s in this context that Ferrari’s decision to poach Hamilton is so exciting. The team’s gone for the strongest line-up available to it — consequences be damned.

‘I’M NOT SCARED AT ALL’

The lunge for Hamilton is the masterstroke of team principal Frédéric Vasseur, who’s rebuilding Ferrari into a winning force.

The effects of his calming influence are clear.

On the track Ferrari has returned to frontrunning form faster than planned.

Off the track Hamilton’s signature is a tremendous vote of confidence.

Contrary to the belief of the curmudgeonly among us, Hamilton isn’t turning Ferrari into the final stop on his superannuation tour. He’s chosen Maranello because he believes he can win in red.

You only need to observe his demeanour to see his rejuvenation.

“They have got every ingredient they need to win a world championship,” he said, per the F1 website. “It’s just about putting all the pieces together.”

But what’s undeniably a great move for Hamilton isn’t necessarily a great move for the stability Vasseur has worked hard to build since ascending to the top job.

Hamilton and Leclerc aren’t a case of master and apprentice. Hamilton, statistically the greatest of all time, is still operating near the top of his game. Leclerc is approaching what’s traditionally considered a driver’s peak years.

There is no neat fit. If Ferrari has built a championship-contending car this season, the aims of its drivers will eventually cut across each other — and clashes inside Ferrari are only ever spectacular.

It will be Vasseur’s unenviable job to keep his drivers’ sights trained not on each other but on the common good.

“It’s always an opportunity and one of the skills of the driver is to try to always improve,” he said ahead of the season, putting a positive spin on the challenge.

“A good way to improve is also to take the experience or the performance of your teammates, because the driver is the closest of you and you can have access to the data that you can work with.

“If you are clever, you can do a step with the potential of your teammate.”

He contended competition between his drivers wasn’t just healthy but necessary to drive the team forwards.

“Honestly, I’m not scared at all with this, because we need to have this kind of emulation,” he said.

“As a team, if we want to perform, we need to have two drivers performing.

“We need to have two drivers in a kind of competition, a positive competition and a positive emulation, and I’m sure that it will be the case.

“We are starting in very good shape now. The most important thing is to keep this relationship, to continue to work as a team and to push as a team. But I’m quite confident.”

WHOSE TEAM IS IT ANYWAY?

Hamilton arrives at Ferrari as a seven-time champion of unimpeachable standing, but he’s going up against Leclerc, who for years has been openly identified as the future of Ferrari.

The Briton has had nothing but praise of Leclerc since announcing his switch to Maranello, but it was his pre-season assessment of his position in the team relative to his new teammate that hinted at the unseen challenge he faces in establishing himself as a Ferrari title contender.

“I’m just trying to observe how he works,” he told ESPN. “He’s very, very professional. He’s clearly well loved within this team and well embedded in this team.

“It is not going to be easy to beat him, naturally.”

Leclerc’s fully embedded status will give the Monegasque an early advantage in their intrateam rivalry. Now in his seventh season with Ferrari, he knows the team inside out — and the team knows him inside out. Each knows intimately how the other works, they know how to get the best from each other at the track and at the factory.

Integration between Leclerc and Ferrari is seamless in a way Hamilton can only dream of for now.

It’s a challenge the Briton is rising to meet.

“This step is huge. It couldn’t be any bigger,” he told ESPN. “And you don’t want to let people down. You want to be able to deliver on your word.

“And so how I decided to come into this year, my resolution, my mentality, is I need to elevate in absolutely every area on my side.

“It’s not just, ‘This is who I am’ and I can just get in. I’ve got to elevate my fitness, my time management, how I engage with my engineers, how much time I spend in the factory — all these different things.

“And I’ve definitely done that, and I’m doing that, and I will continue to do that in this strive for perfection and to achieve the success that I’m aiming to achieve.”

The early signs have been positive. Pre-season testing suggested Hamilton is able to drive the Ferrari in more of his natural style after three years trying to contort himself around his peaky and unpredictable Mercedes.

“We both like to push quite a lot, especially the entries, and on that we are quite similar,” Leclerc said, per the F1 website.

“That’s positive, because I think it requires the same thing out of the car, and I think as a team that is always a good thing because we’ll definitely push in the same direction because we need the same things.”

But Hamilton wasn’t prepared to buy into the hype around his new Ferrari relationship.

Recalling his transition from McLaren to Mercedes, he said it would take months for him to feel close to fully integrated with the team.

“The biggest challenge is getting ready,” he told ESPN. “I remember in my previous team I joined, it wasn’t until six months until I won my first race.

“It takes time to build relationships, to build trust with everybody, to understand how an organisation works, how people are tuned to work, how you can show up for people and get the best out of them, and vice versa. There’s not really a shortcut for that.

“I would say that’s [what] the biggest challenge is. How can I blend in with this team? How can I merge with everyone here?

“But when there’s a will, there’s a way and we are putting in as much work as we can.”

HAMILTON HAS SOMETHING LECLERC DOESN’T HAVE

But Hamilton has one advantage Leclerc can’t replicate: title success.

Hamilton is an 18-year veteran of Formula 1. He’s battled for the championship in most of those seasons.

A driver can be fast. A driver can have slick racecraft. A driver can be decisive and opportunistic in battle. None of those things guarantee they can stand up to the pressure of a championship challenge — especially against their own teammate.

Leclerc is a member of a new breed of openly self-critical drivers, a league to which Hamilton does not subscribe.

It’s not a weakness — Leclerc uses his various public self-lashings as motivation to improve himself — but his tendency to self-flagellate offers us a window into some of his weaknesses.

He gave us an important glimpse on the cool-down lap at the Las Vegas Grand Prix after teammate Carlos Sainz barged past him for a place on the podium.

“Being nice f***s me all the f***ing time — all the f***ing time,” he fumed to his engineer, Bryan Bozzi. “It’s not even being nice, it’s just being respectful.

“I know I need to shut up, but at one point it’s always the same. Oh my f***ing god.”

It wasn’t just that incident. Leclerc had felt taken advantage of by Sainz several times that season and during their partnership, feeling that the Spaniard played faster and looser with team instructions than he was willing to — though never enough to earn a reprimand from management.

“It’s about things that we have been told,” he said guardedly to Sky Sports at the time. “It’s just frustrating when it’s like this, and it’s frustrating for me, but I can understand that nobody understands that.”

For all of Leclerc’s strengths, he’s never been much of a tactician inside the car, certainly compared to Sainz.

Hamilton will also punish him for that.

The Briton has become a master of taking his racing right up to the line of acceptability. He revels in forcing rivals to make tough decisions in battle. He won’t hesitate to put Leclerc to the sword for his “respectful” approach to racing.

Winning championships is as much about a driver’s own strengths as it is about exploiting rivals’ weaknesses. If Hamilton and Leclerc are both contending for the title, fairness — perceived or otherwise — could become a flashpoint. Leclerc has shown him which buttons to press.

FEW HAVE GONE WHERE HAMILTON INTENDS TO GO

There’s a further pressure on Hamilton for attempting to achieve what vanishingly few drivers have managed to do in Formula 1’s 75-year history.

Only two drivers have joined Ferrari as world champions and added to their title tallies.

The first was Juan Manuel Fangio. Arriving at Ferrari as a three-time champion after having won titles with Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Mercedes, he took just one season to convert for the red team, winning the 1956 championship. He would win one more, for Maserati, the following year to complete his five-title haul.

Michael Schumacher is the only driver so far to repeat the feat. A two-time champion with Benneton in 1994–95, he joined Ferrari in 1996 as part of an effort to rebuild the struggling Italian team, eventually succeeding with his first of five consecutive titles in 2000.

The list of failures is longer.

Alain Prost was a three-time champion when he joined Ferrari in 1990, but he was sacked by the team at the end of his second year for describing the 1991 car as a truck.

He joined Williams after a one-year sabbatical, won the title and retired from the sport.

Fernando Alonso sipped from the poisoned chalice next. A two-time champion when he joined in 2010, he toiled for five fruitless years in cars beneath his ability before negotiations for a contract extension collapsed. He hasn’t won another title since.

Sebastian Vettel immediately followed after quitting Red Bull Racing after four world championships in a bid to emulate childhood hero Schumacher in red.

But the challenge eventually wore him down too. Two ugly and demoralising defeats to Hamilton in 2017 and 2018 and Leclerc’s arrival in 2019 led to his effective sacking in 2020, after which a two-season Aston Martin postscript delivered no further joy before retirement.

And it’s not just Ferrari’s history as a dream killer Hamilton will have to overcome.

If he were to win the title this year, he’d be the third-oldest champion in history, behind only Fangio and Farina.

He’ll also have to become only the second driver ever to win titles for both McLaren and Ferrari after Niki Lauda, albeit the Austrian won for Maranello first (1975 and 1977) before Woking (1984).

CAN LECLERC SIZE UP AGAINST THE GOAT?

You might think that history being against Hamilton makes this a slam dunk for Leclerc, but the Monegasque is battling unlikely odds of his own.

If he were to overhaul Hamilton to win the title, he’d join an exclusive club of drivers to have beaten a world champion teammate to the trophy.

Only six drivers have ever done it, and only one has done so in the last 37 years.

The first was Fangio, who won the second-ever championship in 1951 ahead of inaugural title-winner Giuseppe Farina. Albert Ascari was next in 1952, again against Farina.

Denny Hulme beat Jack Brabham to the 1967 title, with Prost following in 1985 for his first over Lauda. Ayrton Senna then beat Prost for his maiden in 1988.

Nico Rosberg is the only contemporary example, beating Hamilton to the 2016 championship before promptly retiring.

Rosberg’s 2016 success is a double rarity that Leclerc would do well to think about, the German being one of only three teammates to have ever beaten Hamilton on points over a season.

The first was Jenson Button in 2011, when Hamilton was navigating disruptions in his personal life. George Russell is the other one, beating Hamilton in 2022, when the seven-time champion accepted the burden of live troubleshooting Mercedes’s wayward car, and again last year

Hamilton simply doesn’t get beaten very often — including in his maiden seasons at new teams, having tied with Fernando Alonso in 2007 at McLaren and having eclipsed Rosberg at Mercedes in 2013.

But these unlikely odds of either driver succeeding only makes this dynamite driver line-up more fascinating, with the pressure ramping up on Hamilton, Leclerc and Vasseur to deliver on their related but ultimately incompatible dreams of success.

Who wins is anyone’s guess, but it could be explosive finding out.