We are a little more than a week away from Sir Lewis Hamilton entering his first Grand Prix as a driver of the famous Scuderia Ferrari. The Italian team signed the seven-time world’s champion to a multi-year contract at the start of 2024, finishing his long run with Mercedes. He becomes the fifth former world champion to join the Italian squad in the last forty years (sixth, if you wish to count the return of Kimi Räikkönen in 2014).

Of course given that only one of those champions would go on to actually add more titles to his resume in his stay with Ferrari, there is a certain doubt about whether Sir Lewis Hamilton can succeed where others have failed. 

However, there is one thing to consider when using brain juice to evaluate Hamilton’s success chance: it does not matter. Now, given some of the previous writing in the Gravel Trap, assuming that the author is making a philosophical point is natural. Instead, the argument will be as worldly as an argument about something intangible as “legacy” can be.

It is very simple: from the author’s view of F1 fandom and narratives in sports, Sir Lewis Hamilton cannot possibly lose.

Before the author gets into why any negative outcome will not harm any historic evaluation of his career, a quick look at all the reasons why the move is a good idea in terms of winning is appropriate. There is the upswing of form at Ferrari under Frédéric Vasseur: after a slight downturn in performance in his first season, the SF-24 was arguably the best challenger the team has produced since the SF71H and, importantly, managed to stay competitive throughout the entire season. This is a marked change from aforementioned SF71H and other Ferrari chassis in recent years like the F1-75. The new Ferrari car looked good in testing, so in terms of aerodynamics, Hamilton might just have joined the strongest Ferrari since the Jean Todt era.

There is also the decline of the Mercedes F1 Team. While the team did manage to score four victories in 2024, it is still fairly obvious that the old juggernaut that dominated the 2010s no longer exists. The talent drain in the late title-winning seasons and beyond results in a downturn comparable to the Lotus of the mid-80s. The author doubts they will end up like Lotus and thinks they could very well return to championship contender status if Mercedes-Benz continues to be willing to fund and run a F1 team. However, this rebuilding situation will most likely not bear fruits until the turn of the 2030s (unless Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains pull off a masterpiece for the 2026 regulations comparable to the PU106A Hybrid); obviously way too late for Sir Lewis Hamilton himself to reap the successes.

Pointing out the obvious: if Hamilton were to succeed where Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel failed, it would be a massive boost to his claim of being the greatest driver of his generation, if not of all time. Since this Gravel Trap mostly argues in Hamilton’s favour on assumption of failure, there is no need to belabour that point. Instead, the author will look at the various possible ways in which Hamilton can not win the record-setting eighth world’s championship and go through why they will not really hurt Hamilton.

First off, there is the option of the car being good enough and Hamilton himself making a mess of things, losing the title on account of own mistakes. Normally, that would hurt Hamilton’s reputation even at his advanced age, but thanks to the numerous mistakes in key situations by Sebastian Vettel and Hamilton’s teammate in Charles Leclerc, this would probably serve more to redeem the former two. Hamilton also joining the club of Ferrari stars making terrible blunders would probably change the narrative to a story that there would be something at Ferrari that provokes drivers into making major missteps. Whether such a narrative would be justified is to be questioned, but the public’s opinion would probably turn in that direction.

Alternatively, we could end up in a scenario where Sir Lewis Hamilton performs well enough, but the Ferrari ends up not good enough. While Ferrari fans would probably moan, given as Hamilton said the team has “every ingredient” to win just a few weeks ago, it is safe to say that F1 media and fandom as a whole would afford Lewis a lot more leniency. Having failed to win a driver’s championship since 2007 despite having the strongest driver lineups in that period (except maybe Red Bull) does not afford you much room to complain about not winning when your drivers are holding up their end of the bargain.

A different scenario would be if, regardless of the quality of the car, Charles Leclerc straight-up outperforms Sir Lewis Hamilton. For that, we can once more look towards Sebastian Vettel. Leclerc certainly ended the notion of Vettel as an elite driver by having the edge on him in 2019 and utterly demolishing him in 2020. After two seasons away from Ferrari, Vettel had partially re-gathered the respect of the media, ending up in the top 10 of driver rankings in 2022 on various F1 fansites. Unlike Vettel, Hamilton joins the team Leclerc has made his own and does so at the age of 40. If anything, Leclerc not having a clear edge on Hamilton will be perceived as much more damning than Hamilton getting beaten by Leclerc.

Let us indulge in the absolute worst case scenario: the car is great or even championship-material and Hamilton just is not able to bring it. He joins Kimi Räikkönen or Jacques Villeneuve as former world champions who did not retire in time and turned their final years into a mess. He struggles against Leclerc in a way that would bring back memories of aforementioned shellacking by Vettel in 2020, without any of the excuses that some fans afforded the German.

To understand why F1 fandom would probably be generous in forgiving Hamilton for this type of failure, we can look towards Räikkönen’s continued popularity even in the last years where he was occupying a seat that should have gone to younger talent. We can also consider how Michael Schumacher’s Mercedes stint is considered a footnote to an otherwise historic career. Alternatively, we can look towards another sport the author is very fond of.

Meet Michael Jeffrey Jordan.

After one of the most successful careers in the history of professional sports and becoming the greatest basketball player of all time in the eyes of a majority of fans, Jordan retired from the game at the end of 1998. In 2001, Michael Jordan abandoned his then-new role as president of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards to come out of retirement. While the two seasons he played had some very impressive performances, just like Michael Schumacher, at its core it was a failure. In his third career stint, Washington did not make the playoffs, its players hardly learned from Jordan’s example and his scoring was exceedingly inefficient in an era where the game was played at a fundamentally inefficient level. After stepping down as a player for the final time, he was let go from his front office role, thereby turning his entire stint into a giant waste of time, one Jordan himself feels resentful about. Since this is not a basketball column, the author will spare the reader any further detail and get to the point: nobody is holding this stint against Jordan. In fact, many fans will defend it and use his great outings to further his already amazing legacy. Even those who consider it a failure will observe a gentlemen’s agreement to just not mention it.

While we live in a time where fans are more demanding and have the tools to make their opinions known, it is inane to think that they will suddenly dismiss the legacy of the most popular driver in modern F1 history. In a time where the world feed and the highlight clips still involve jingoistic British announcers, that will make sure that Hamilton will have a positive voice out there as well.

With all those aspects in mind, can anyone blame Sir Lewis Hamilton if he is excited for the 2025 season to begin? 

Sources: CBS News, F1 Mathematical Model, Ferrari, formula1.com, Racefans, Stats F1, The Race

Image Sources: FMT, goodfon.com, Morio (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, resized), Steffen Prößdorf (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, resized)