Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Iconic Ferrari Move is a Lesson on Self-Worth
We should all be taking notes.
What makes a cultural icon a cultural icon? Is it accomplishment and accolades beyond their peers? Is it international pull and attention? Is it value both monetary and historic? Is it transcending their profession and being recognized beyond what they do? Whatever our definition of the term, there is no question that Sir Lewis Hamilton is one.
Such statements are often met with derision, especially when the icon being discussed is Black; the cries of ‘over-rated,’ ‘over-hyped,’ and ‘hyperbolic’ are loud and unavoidable and have been boringly consistent even for the likes of Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan (look under the comments on any Team LH account and you’ll find some incensed, usually white F1 fanatic, calling the racer’s fans delusional). But the facts, in this case, speak for themselves.
Before we dig into his statistics, here’s a little crash course on the sport for anyone who has no idea what F1 is and why it’s all the internet seems to be able to talk about. Formula One (or F1 as it is more commonly known) is a racing series that follows (in theory; we’ll get to this later) the 20 best drivers in the world as they compete almost weekly around the world for both individual race wins (or the Grand Prix) and the overall World Championship. In football terms, imagine if a cup or trophy was handed out after every game. Ten teams on the grid compete for the top prize, each with two drivers, and because F1 is a money game, the development of your car often depends on how much money you have, how good your engineers are, and how much time you have. This is an oversimplification for the sake of brevity, but the idea is that the better your car, the better your chances of winning (look at me getting into my Will Buxton bag).
Because the margins are so small, the difference between positions can sometimes be as narrow as a tenth of a second. It is practically impossible for a driver to win a Grand Prix, let alone a World Championship. Hamilton has won 103 Grand Prixs. 103. He holds the joint record for World Championships with the legendary Michael Schumacher, with seven to his name. The most insane thing about all of this? He probably would have had eight if it were not for the bizarre interference of Michael Masi during the fateful Abu Dhabi Grand Prix back in 2021. Hamilton started his Formula One career with McLaren in 2007 and became the then-youngest ever to win a world championship in 2008. He has raced against former world champions and beat them as a relative newbie, driven underperforming cars, and won world championships in them. Hamilton has helped build a relatively low-key team into a titan of the sport with sheer talent and consistency. And he has done it all in a sport hell-bent on punishing minorities and ignoring anyone who doesn’t come from money.
Like all great athletes, he has surpassed the very sport he has dominated for years. He has more followers than the official F1 Instagram account. He is a fashion icon, and fans and publications like Vogue, dubbing race weekends ‘Lewis Hamilton Fashion Week,’ turning the paddock consistently into a runway. Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Louis Vuitton, and Valentino. You name it, he’s rocking it. The Met Gala? Done it. Though the criticism has been consistent from older F1 heads who have a problem with how well-rounded he is as a persona outside of the sport, it seems necessary to remind everyone that there are plenty of racers who don’t have had any other hobbies that still haven’t accomplished what he has as a driver.
Another thing Hamilton has been known for beyond his fashion? Being a Mercedes driver. Most of his accolades came from the team, his relationship with the late Niki Lauda bringing him into a team that was, before his entry, rather unremarkable on paper. He moved to Mercedes in 2013 and won back-to-back titles in 2014 and 2015 before winning four straight titles from 2017 to 2020. Toto Wolff, team principal and, up until recently, it seems a good friend of Hamilton — has gained clout and power in correlation to his ascension in the sport. Hamilton is a generational talent; Toto is portrayed as a genius for managing him and the team, brilliant by association. It seemed to be the most harmonious relationship in Formula One and almost a certainty that Hamilton would retire a Mercedes driver in the coming years until a week ago when one of the biggest stories in F1 history dropped. Hamilton has signed a multi-year contract with Scuderia Ferrari, starting in 2025. He would be a Mercedes driver no more past this season. He was breaking free.
To say the news broke the internet would be an understatement: emergency podcast recordings, millions of tweets, endless commentary. The Ferrari stocks went up; In 24 hours, they surged 12.58% from USD 345.92 on Jan. 31 to USD 389.45 on Feb. 1. People started buying Ferrari merch. Duolingo was busy threatening people to learn Italian.
Fans hadn’t even dared to dream that this would be possible; Hamilton has always been loyal to Mercedes, almost to a fault. Yet, here we are, lucky enough to live in the timeline where it is, in fact, possible. The biggest question is no longer whether or not the rumors are true but rather what had driven (pun very much intended) Hamilton to make the change.
After the shitshow that was 2021, the tide turned with a new era of dominance — the Max Verstappen era — commencing. Instead of developing a car that would compete with the rising threat of Verstappen’s Red Bull, Mercedes produced one of their worst cars in years and doubled down in 2023. They refused to change direction at the order of team principal Toto and forced the departure of Hamilton’s long-time teammate, Valtteri Bottas. It also factors into the descent of Mercedes, though Bottas, like all of Hamilton’s teammates, entered the team with dreams of beating one of the sport’s budding greats. He quickly realized that that was not an attainable goal and worked in tandem with his teammate to guarantee Mercedes' success. He was replaced with young hotshot George Russell, a driver forever touted as one of his cohort’s best but has nothing tangible to show for that assertion. Bottas’s exit from the team marked yet another point of disagreement between Hamilton and the team his success has undoubtedly helped build. Toto has always had a fascination with shiny new talent, and it has in the past served him well, but just as Bottas was cast aside in a move that has so far bared him no results, it seems that he has been preparing unwisely to replace Hamilton in the next few years too.
Little moments have cropped up precisely in the last few years to illustrate a certain ill-informed blasé-ness towards Hamilton by Mercedes: a refusal, for the most part, to defend him and fight for him harder after he was robbed of his title in 2021 comes to mind, as does a specific podium where he was left without his team to celebrate him. Instead, he was (ironically and tellingly) celebrated by the Ferrari team members who congratulated him for his work. Reports that the team was still looking to build around a mostly unreliable, somewhat self-oriented driver that is Russell, altering their focus in a compulsive hope to ‘build for the future’ also could not have helped keep the driver where he was. In the end, it was a refusal by Mercedes to sign him again long-term that seemed to sway his decision, paired with the insistence by Ferrari to show him that they understood his value.
Ferrari is a name as iconic as Hamilton’s. Despite their dip (the team hasn’t won a championship since 2008), their name recognition remains unmatched by the rest of the paddock. It’s funny, just as Verstappen’s era of dominance means little to anyone beyond the sport. No matter what RedBull accomplishes in the next few years, it will forever remain isolated and remarkable only as far as F1 is concerned compared to Ferrari. Neither Verstappen nor RedBull have it. Whatever that little glow of magic makes something unique, that is not a problem that either Ferrari or Hamilton have. Fans have lamented this era’s lack of real competition or excitement on social media, and there has been talk of newer fans being turned off by the repetitive races. He isn’t even the reigning champ; still, Hamilton is providing the sport with the much-needed spark it needs.
This isn’t just an intelligent business move on Hamilton’s part; it is also about self-respect. How much are you, as a Black talent, willing to accept? At what point do you set aside your loyalty and choose to put yourself first? Mercedes took him for granted and did the most dangerous thing you can possibly do to a man who has made a career out of defying expectations: they underestimated him.
It's no secret that the move will be full of challenges. His teammate this time around is no George Russell (who finished several places below Hamilton in the driver’s championship last season) but a genuine talent in Charles Leclerc. He’ll be in a new country, adapting to a distinct culture that has othered people like him for generations (he will be the first Black driver to don those red Ferrari overalls in the team’s history), in a team infamous for its relentless internal politics. The Tifosi are delighted to have Hamilton join their team, but they are also temperamental. If it were any other driver making this switch, he’d be in danger of those red overalls being too much to handle. We saw it happen to other champions before him, like Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel. But he isn’t any other driver; he’s Lewis Hamilton.
And even if Mercedes seems to have forgotten that fact, it looks like he thankfully has not.
