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Looking at the history of established Formula 1 megastars recruited to Ferrari shows a mixed bag of outcomes. But understanding why they were mixed might be the best way of foreseeing how things will be there for Lewis Hamilton.
Even if you’re not Hamilton, surely the highest-profile and most scrutinised F1 driver of all time, switching teams to Ferrari when you have already achieved success elsewhere is a very big deal.
There’s a distinction to be made here between those like Charles Leclerc or Felipe Massa who were brought in as team proteges and those imported as megastars already such as Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso or Sebastian Vettel.
The case of Carlos Sainz was quite unusual – neither a megastar at the time of his signing nor from the Ferrari family, he was brought in as a very able driver to plug the gap created by the management decision to nudge Vettel out of the door once Leclerc had established that he could better fulfil the role Vettel had been hired to do; ie, lead the team by sheer performance.
But the big signing of Hamilton is unique. Because unlike Schumacher, Raikkonen (first time around), Alonso or Vettel, he has not been recruited as the team’s long-term future around whom everything will be built. Nor has he been signed in the expectation that he will put Leclerc in the shade in the way that Leclerc did to Vettel (which was very much the plan at the time). Ferrari doesn’t feel the need to benchmark Leclerc in the way it did with Vettel.
So Hamilton is there as a huge name first and foremost, as a marketing asset not only a racing one. Sure, it’s been done in the expectation that he will perform. But he’s not got the future prospects of the whole team resting upon his shoulders.
From his perspective, that’s a good thing. Schumacher was the only one who managed to meet that expectation without being burned – and he did it through having the combined personalities and abilities of Ross Brawn and Jean Todt empowering him. Together, the three were a forcefield and the entire operation was focused around Michael. Which combined with his talent and application made success inevitable.
Raikkonen was recruited by Luca di Montezemolo who was uneasy with the level of control exerted by Todt/Brawn/Schumacher, a trio who were technically his employees. He decided the future would have him in fuller control and to that end Raikkonen was recruited, even before Schumacher (or Brawn or Todt) had decided what his plans were.
But although Raikkonen was a brilliant driver, he was in no way interested in being a direct Schumacher replacement, with all the application and graft which that implied. The idea of Kimi learning the names of everyone on his team and going to great pains to understand their strengths and weaknesses and getting them onside with his quest was laughable. He just wasn’t that guy. You plugged him into the car and made life as uncomplicated as possible for him.
It garnered him a title at his first attempt, partly because of the momentum of how good the team created by Brawn, Todt and Schumacher was. But there was no replication of the energy required to maintain that – and there was never going to be. So when the realisation came to Ferrari that it needed more of a leader than this, more of a direct Schumacher replacement, it hired Alonso – and paid Raikkonen to leave early to make way for him.
Alonso was very much more proactive than Raikkonen, which was needed. But it still didn’t replicate the Schumacher era; he wasn’t empowered in the same way. Under the management now of di Montezemolo’s lieutenant Stefano Domenicali, the team was pulled around its new signing in 2010. But not automatically so.
Instead, Alonso had insisted this be the case after the second race of the season in Australia when team-mate Massa was not moved aside to allow Alonso his recovery after a first corner incident. As a result he finished fourth behind Massa on a day when he felt he could otherwise have challenged for victory. All for the sake of not upsetting a driver Alonso felt should be in the support role.
A summit meeting between Alonso and Domenicali the following week established that in future Alonso would take priority. Hence Hockenheim – ‘Fernando is faster than you’ - later that year.
Crucially, Massa had not been informed of the agreement reached earlier in the season between Alonso and Domenicali, just underlining how this was not a replica of Schumacher era Ferrari.
But Ferrari was too big a name, too prestigious, to be permanently in the thrall of a driver. A driver was an employee in service to the glory of the Scuderia. Brawn et al had simply set up a protective enclave for Schumacher which had allowed him to operate free of that. The team Alonso had joined no longer featured that protection.
When Alonso lost out on the 2010 title at the Abu Dhabi finale to a strategic error from the pitlane, he became – in the words of someone who served there at the time – emotionally decoupled from the team. His remaining time there would be spent raging against the failings rather than being empowered into changing them.
Montezemolo couldn’t tolerate that for too long – “Fernando was a fantastic driver, maybe even the best,” he recalled in 2015, “but he was giving the impression that every victory was won by him despite the team” – and so he recruited the man he’d been advised years earlier by Schumacher was a better fit: Sebastian Vettel.
Seb had every bit as focused an ambition as Alonso but an easier personality, and he took many of his cues in the way he worked from Schumacher. It might have worked. Except di Montezemolo was gone by the time Vettel arrived. So he was never empowered in the way Luca had told him he would be. Instead he was told – by Maurizio Arrivabene, lieutenant to new corporate boss Sergio Marchionne – to stop trying to run the team and just drive.
With that publicly-expressed sentence, they lost Vettel’s buy-in. Meantime, the bosses were thinking, ‘How good is he, anyway? Let’s get our young charge in alongside’. Hence Leclerc’s arrival and Vettel’s competitive collapse in 2020.
At the highest level Ferrari was a dysfunctional team post-Brawn/Schumacher/Todt - and every lead driver suffered from that, especially when the titles didn’t come. Mattia Binotto, as someone who had spent his entire working life at the organisation, could never break out from that hierarchy and was compromised accordingly.
The recruitment of Fred Vasseur as his replacement has helped calm things. Calm but authoritative and recruited from outside the company’s structure, he’s been able to imbue his personality into the team. Scuderia Ferrari is still scrutinised to an insane level within Italy and will always be F1’s highest-profile team, but Vasseur has made it a calmer place from inside.
This is the Ferrari which Hamilton has joined. Vasseur is a great fan of both Leclerc and Hamilton, having run them to championships in his junior teams, and has a great rapport with them both. He’s proven supremely adept at dealing with any in-team competitive tensions, defusing them before they’ve been allowed to fester. Furthermore, this isn’t going to be a new level of scrutiny for Hamilton. He’s used to scrutiny like no driver has ever been.
By the same token he’s not going there with the level of control Schumacher enjoyed. The equivalent would be him bringing Toto Wolff and James Allison and much of the Mercedes aero department with him and having Vasseur agree to a pact between them making it impossible for the upper management to do anything but provide the budget. That would not only be impossible now but wouldn’t be how Hamilton could operate. He’s just not wired-up in that way.
No, Hamilton’s success at Ferrari will depend upon the team Vasseur has in place doing their job at least as well as Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes – and upon Hamilton’s personal performance. It’s not as complex an equation as being a Ferrari mega-star once was.
