Ferrari mess it up with Lewis Hamilton as worries raised for 2025 season
Lewis Hamilton will join up with Ferrari when the 2025 season gets underway, but his move to the Scuderia is starting to raise eyebrows.
Ferrari were wrong to let Carlos Sainz in order to sign Lewis Hamilton, according to Express Sport readers. The legendary Brit shocked the motorsport world when his switch to the Scuderia was announced in February, but his performances since then have raised concerns about his longevity in the sport.
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When Fred Vasseur made the call to bring the seven-time world champion to Maranello, he was entering the 2024 campaign off the back of a comfortable P3 Drivers’ Championship finish with only the Red Bull drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez above him.
However, after five rounds of the 2024 season, Hamilton is languishing down in P9 in the standings with just one top-eight finish to his name. His impressive recovery drive in Shanghai produced a P9 finish from P18 on the grid, but that result means that the iconic Brit has claimed just six points from the last four Grands Prix.
In a survey of 1,610 Express Sport readers, 82 per cent believed that Vasseur had made a mistake in not renewing Sainz’s contract, with only 18 per cent believing that the Frenchman was correct to cast the former Renault and McLaren star aside and sign Hamilton when he had the chance.
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While Hamilton’s struggles are understandable given the context of some misfortune, the unpredictability of Mercedes’ 2024 challenger, the W15, and a poor qualifying record off the back of some ill-fated set-up experiments, there is no escaping the fact that the seven-time champion has been outshone by Sainz this year.
After his exit from Ferrari was confirmed in February, Sainz has been a man on a mission. The Madrid-born racer kicked off the campaign with a podium finish behind the two Red Bulls, before bouncing back from a stint on the sidelines with appendicitis by winning the Australian Grand Prix with an exceptionally composed drive.
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Sainz’s third Grand Prix victory of his career was then backed up by another podium in Japan before his streak of top-three finishes came to an end with a P5 in Shanghai last weekend. Such consistent displays have left him just seven points behind Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc, despite missing a race through illness.
While Sainz has had to make peace with the fact that his Ferrari career is over, the 29-year-old isn’t short of options when it comes to his next move. Both Red Bull and Mercedes are weighing up signing the Spaniard, while Audi are keen to make him the face of their F1 project ahead of their 2026 arrival.
